1,721,106 research outputs found
The social meaning of swearing variation
No full textThis thesis is about linguistic variation in swearing and its consequences for how speakers are socially evaluated. Abundant research has established that, beyond its perception as rude or impolite, swearing is hugely socially meaningful in a variety of ways (Stapleton, 2010; Beers Fägersten, 2012). Swearing has been shown to index solidarity (Daly et al., 2004), intimacy (Stapleton, 2003), differing forms of masculinity (De Klerk, 1997) and femininity (S. E. Hughes, 1992), honesty (Feldman et al., 2017), believability (Rassin & Heijden, 2005) and lack of intelligence (DeFrank & Kahlbaugh, 2019), among other traits. The activation of these social meanings also depends on language-external factors such as speaker gender (Howell & Giuliano, 2011), ethnicity (Jacobi, 2014) and social status (T. Jay & Janschewitz, 2008). What has not been established is whether this also depends on language-internal factors such as pronunciation, word formation or sentence structure. This thesis investigates the effect of variation from three different domains of language - phonetics, morphology and semantics/pragmatics - on social evaluation of a speaker. To do so, the thesis takes an experimental approach using the variationist sociolinguistic framework. For variation in each domain, two experiments were used to test for different levels of awareness, following Squires’s (2016) approach for grammatical variation (see also Schmidt, 1990). One experiment tested whether people perceived the variation, while a second tested whether people noticed the variation in the process of social evaluation; the concepts of perceiving and noticing roughly map to the Labovian concepts of the sociolinguistic indicator and marker respectively (Labov, 1972). At the level of phonetics, variation in the realisation of variable (ING) in swearwords (e.g., fucking vs fuckin) was first tested using a variant categorization task, revealing that listeners have an implicit bias towards the velar [IN] variant when hearing swearwords, compared to neutral words and non-words. An auditory matched-guise task then revealed that this same bias affects how listeners extract social information from (ING) tokens attached to swearwords in relation to social meanings typically associated with the variable (Schleef et al., 2017). This result suggests that, rather than pronunciation affecting how swearwords are socially evaluated, swearwords can affect how other phonetic sources of social meaning are evaluated
What does fear sound like? Voice pitch, cognitive frames, and perceptions of domestic abuse victimization
No full textSociolinguists emphasize the context-dependence of social meanings activated by linguistic variation (Eckert, 2008). I examine this dynamic using the Goffmanian concept of frames (Goffman, 1974), focusing on the intersection of gender and sexuality. More specifically, I explore pitch variation as an index of femininity in the domestic abuse victimization frame. People expect the “ideal victim” to be weak, blameless, and, importantly, female (Christie, 1986). Using an experiment, I show that female victims who diverge from this expectation by having a lower voice pitch are perceived as less scared and less rational than their higher-pitched counterparts. This effect only emerges for victims in heteronormative relationships, however, with voice pitch becoming “indexically inoperative” (Levon & Ye, 2019) in cases where a victim already diverges from stereotypical expectations of a victim by having a female abuser. I discuss this finding in relation to established dynamics in sociolinguistic perception, and to domestic abuse policing
Linguistic profiling and shifting standards: Bias against Uyghur speakers of L2 Mandarin in the job market
No full textPerceptions of non-native speech are often guided by listeners’ expectations of a speaker. These expectations are informed by pre-existing beliefs about how particular types of people sound. Perceived ethnicity can affect how listeners evaluate speech (Rubin 1992; D’Onofrio 2019); however, most of this work has been situated in Western contexts. The current study details an experiment that tests for the linguistic profiling (Baugh 2005) of the Uyghur population of China, a group that has been systematically oppressed for their ethnicity and religion. Using name-based ethnicity priming, participants thought they were hearing either a Korean, Uyghur or non-descript speaker of L2 Mandarin. Results showed that participants rated the speaker as significantly more confident, intelligent and hard-working in the Uyghur condition. However, participants were significantly less likely to hire the supposedly ‘Uyghur’ speaker. We propose that these results are evidence of shifting standards (Biernat 2012), whereby listener expectations are lowered by social stereotypes, leading to inflated subjective ratings of minority groups, without leading to positive outcomes
Pragmatic alternatives and social meaning
No full textThe notion that an utterance’s meaning in context depends not just on its entailments but also on what could have been said instead – that is, on pragmatic alternatives – is a key insight of pragmatic theory and has been employed fruitfully in accounting for central pragmatic phenomena like implicature. In this article we show why and how alternatives not only play a crucial role in familiar cases of implicature (e.g., some +> ‘not all’), but engender social meaning as well. Incorporating sociolinguistic theory and perspectives, we present a sociopragmatic framework that generalizes insights about alternatives in inference from previous pragmatic research. Then, taking as our empirical focus singular expressions of the form the X where an alternative like my/your X would be felicitous, we demonstrate the utility and broad scope of this framework. As we show, alternatives are crucial to interpretation and inference very generally, whether dealing in morphosyntactic objects or phonetics, situation descriptions or social meanings
A word in a word: social perceptions of expletive-infixation
No full textDespite being one of the most ‘offensive’ swearwords in the English language, fuck (and its various derivations) is also, paradoxically, one of the most frequently uttered swearwords (Beers Fägersten 2012). A possible reason for this is that fuck can express a range of different pragmatic functions (McEnery & Xiao 2004) and social meanings (see Author 1, 2022 for a review), depending on language-external factors such as speaker gender (DeFrank & Kahlbaugh, 2019). Comparatively underexplored is the role of language-internal factors in the social meanings of fuck. This chapter examines the effect of expressive morphology (Zwicky & Pullum 1987), in the form of infixation, on how fuck is socially evaluated. The research aims to inform our understanding of how the social meanings associated with particular words can depend on their form and integration with other words. The chapter details a visual matched-guise task in which 139 participants rated hypothetical speakers on scales of funny, sarcastic, happy, and rude. Results suggest that the presence and well-formedness of swearing infixation influenced responses across all scales. The chapter discusses these findings in relation to previous work linking the attribution of social meanings like funny to a word’s structural markedness (Dingemanse & Thompson 2020)
The acquisition of Multicultural London English: child and adolescent diphthong variation in West London
No full textThis study investigated Multicultural London English (MLE) diphthongs as produced by children and adolescents in the London borough of Ealing, UK. We conducted an acoustic analysis of the diphthongs face, price and goat in the speech of 24 young people aged 16–24 years and, 14 children aged 5–7 years. The results revealed different production patterns between the children and adolescents for some but not all the diphthong variables. We found that the children’s and adolescents’ diphthongs were similar in the quality of the onset, and similar to the MLE system described in East London, in the London borough of Hackney. However, the children had not acquired monophthongization of the diphthongs, with adolescents producing significantly more monophthongal tokens of price, goat and, to a lesser extent, face. These findings have implications both for the study of multiethnolects and MLE, and for research on children’s acquisition of sociophonetic variation
Gender penalty? Linguistic discrimination and perceptions of female football commentators
No full textThis experimental sociolinguistic study investigates implicit attitudes relating to female football commentators. Several high-profile sports-media figures have claimed that women’s voices are “too high-pitched” for commentary on men’s football, a domain in which traditional, heteronormative gender relations remain especially dominant. With this critique in mind, we conducted a social perception experiment using voices artificially manipulated for pitch to investigate the interaction of pitch and gender stereotypes in this context. Contrary to the male-centred meta-discourse surrounding female commentators, our results show that listeners actually judge female commentators with lower-pitched voices less favourably compared to higher-pitched female voices. Male listeners, in particular, prefer gender-typical voices and male voices generally. These results support previous claims about the influence of stored stereotypes on the social evaluation of speech, how evaluations are dependent upon the specific gendered dynamics of a given domain, and the pervasiveness of a “double-bind” which female commentators are faced with
"How's the wife?": Pragmatic reasoning in spousal reference
Full text linkIn the vein of recent research at the intersection of semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics (Eckert, 2019; Beltrama, 2020), the current study illuminates the complex interrelations between encoded meaning, pragmatic reasoning, and the social matrix within which language is used and interpreted. Our empirical focus is spousal reference: specifically, the use and interpretation of the form the wife/husband, where use of a possessive pronoun (POSS) instead of the is possible. We show that pragmatic reasoning over the relevant expressions’ form and semantics offers a principled set of core motivations for choosing the over POSS in spousal reference. At the same time, we present an analysis of attested examples, meta-linguistic commentary on the wife/husband, and a matched-guise perception experiment that together show that how the expressions and the people who use them are ultimately evaluated depends crucially on multiple contextual factors, including whose spouse is being referred to, and—as research on language and gender would lead one to expect—whether the spousal term is wife or husband. Taken together, this study underscores the need for careful consideration of the role of both cultural and discourse context in social perception studies and, more generally, for a holistic approach to language use, variation, and interpretation.</p
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