The following people from the Sociolinguistics Lab will be presenting at NWAV 52 this year:
Adam Barnhardt is seeking expert input on the next stage of his ongoing project via a Project Launch poster titled: Patterns of social meanings indexed to Low-Back-Merger Shifted vowels in Michigan.
Connor Bechler will present prior work that he undertook at the University of Kentucky: Evaluating wav2vec2 speech recognition and forced alignment on a multi-varietal language documentation collection.
Jessica Shepherd, Drake Howard, and Betsy Sneller will present interim results from Jess’s first PhD qualifying paper research: Pronunciation in the [mɪɾən]: Post-tonic /t/ flapping in Michigan: a non-white male-led change.
Adam’s work and the study by Jess, Betsy, and Drake all use speech data from the MI Diaries project.
We’ll also be looking out for presentations by the former MSU people shown in bold below:
James Stanford, George Stain, Monica Nesbitt: Phonological foundations of ethnic divergence: The Low-Back Merger Shift and the African American Vowel Shift as opposite movements.
Kaitlyn Owens and Monica Nesbitt: Changing boundaries: Evidence from Northern Cities Shift categorical perception in Michigan.
Amalia Robinson, Monica Nesbitt and Xiao Dong: The phonology of Black women in Boston (across age, ethnicity, and style).
Xiao Dong, Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, and Chien-Jer Charles Lin: Social perception of neutral tone and rhotacization in Mandarin Chinese: How do Beijing and Taiwan speakers differ and does place orientation matter?
Rebecca Roeder: /ay/ glide weakening in North Carolina and the origins of the Southern Vowel Shift.
Dennis Preston and Terumi Imai-Brandle: Reconstructing American English inputs in a globally available mass media product: Intensifiers in the television series Gilmore Girls.
In the last two years, we’ve welcomed two waves of new sociolinguistics-oriented graduate students into the Sociolinguistics Lab.
In fall 2023, Emily Duggan and Kate Speak began their Masters degrees in Linguistics. Kate has left to pursue a career in secondary education, while Emily is now in her second year and is preparing a masters thesis proposal on the socioindexical meanings of two identity labels, lesbian and dyke. Emily has also participated in the MI Diaries project, most recently as a regular chair of our weekly all-team meetings. Last spring, Emily was a key member of our cross-lab reading group on game theoretic semantics and sociolinguistic meaning.
Also in Fall 2023 we welcomed PhD Linguistics students Jessica Shepherd and Annan Kirk. Jessica completed a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics at Brigham Young University. She is really interested in phonological variation between speakers and she’s currently working on a project that investigates sound change in Michigan English. Annan has an MA degree in Linguistics from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She’s interested in language and gender and in grammatical variation. She’s currently looking at adjectival intensifiers in Michigan English. Both Jessica and Annan have been graduate research assistants on the MI Diaries project.
Fall 2024 brought two new students to the lab: Hamlin Teng and Connor Bechler. Hamlin holds a masters degree in Sociology from Zhejiang University in China. He’s interested in statistical modeling of sociolinguistic variation and change. Currently Hamlin is conducting some research for the MI Diaries project on the demographics and submission patterns of its participants. Connor has a Masters degree in Linguistics from the University of Kentucky. Connor is interested in the phonetics/phonology interface, language change, and developing computational tools for under-resourced languages. He’s currently the Sociolinguistics Lab RA and a research assistant on the MI Diaries project.
Maeve Eberhardt(University of Vermont) is giving a talk as part of the MSU Linguistics colloquium at 3pm on Friday, October 11, 2024. (Fun fact: Maeve was lab member Emily Duggan‘s professor when Emily was an undergraduate student!). Linguistics colloquium talks are organized by MSU Linguistics graduate students. For Zoom details, please contact Jess Shepherd, sheph157@msu.edu.
From rights to justice for all: The discourse of abortion in old and new media
The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in 2022 (Dobbs v. Jackson) has had a profound impact on the ability to access abortion care across the United States. With the removal of legal protections at the federal level, nearly two dozen individual states swiftly passed legislation that banned abortion within their borders. In this talk, I probe the discourses circulating around and shaping the meaning of abortion in traditional and new media.
I first present the results of a study examining abortion in newspaper coverage directly following the Dobbs decision (Eberhardt, 2023). Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, I show that while the mainstream press maintains a staunch position in favor of Roe, this is rooted in an abstract notion of rights, and obscures structural inequities of gender, race, and class. Furthermore, individuals enacting that right to abortion are deliberately legitimized within a neoliberal set of logics, and constructed as justified in making a ‘responsible’ calculated choice.
I use these findings as a point of entry into the discourse of #abortionrights on the social media platform Instagram (Eberhardt, under review). Multimodal critical discourse analysis reveals a distinctly different picture within this online space when responding to abortion legislation. Creators use a wide range of semiotic resources to craft engaging, informative, and affectively poignant responses. While #abortionrights on Instagram can reproduce a dominant narrative of white feminism in a similar way to traditional news media, it simultaneously enables the circulation of transgressive messaging, bringing intersectional feminism into sharp focus. Posts are laced with demands for broad acknowledgement that rights do not equal access, that abortion is not something that needs to be legitimized, and that the capacity to act is inequitably distributed across the populace in ways that compound existing structural oppressions. I argue that this is the promise of social media: creators are able to reach a wide audience through invocation of dominant framing (here, a rights-based understanding of abortion), only then to upend that narrative via the democratized space of online platforms. In this way, social media, despite its drawbacks, has the potential to contribute to a larger activist agenda that moves us towards social justice and change.
Zhanna has been associated with the lab for a couple of years and she is currently the Social Media Manager for the MI Diaries project. This role builds on Zhanna’s internship in summer 2023 in Argentina, where she worked on social media and web design for a non-profit, Observatorio Social.
