Category: Events - Page 2 - Sociolinguistics Lab

MSU students, faculty, and alumni presenting at NWAV 52

October 15, 2024

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. See you in Miami!

Events

Maeve Eberhardt presenting at MSU

October 8, 2024

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.

Conferences / Events / People / Research / Undergraduates

Socio Lab members present (and win!) at MSU’s UURAF

May 14, 2024

Undergraduate students from the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab were well represented at the 2024 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) in April. Gage Landeryou and Caroline Zackerman shared research they conducted for their senior theses in Linguistics under the direction of lab co-director Betsy Sneller. Two other lab students, Drake Howard and Lin Cabada, presented on research that they had conducted for faculty supervisors in French and in Writing respectively. Gage Landeryou gave a winning presentation on transgender speech Gage Landeryou's study was titled ExpressING Gender: The effect of situational comfort on (ing) pronunciation in transgender speech. For this innovative work and for an engaging and professional style, Gage was awarded a prize for best oral presentation in the 'Social Sciences - General' category. Gage Landeryou, one of the two winners for oral presentation in the Social Sciences - General category. Students interacted with visitors and judges UURAF is a huge event. It can be really overwhelming for the in-person, on-site student presenters. According to MSU's UURAF 2024 website: The 26th UURAF was held onsite at the Breslin Center and online at Symposium. Over 1,000 students from 12 colleges participated in the event. They were mentored by over 600 faculty, staff, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and government/industry partners. There were over 700 presentations in 32 different subject areas. We're proud to report that Drake, Caroline, and Lin did a great job of explaining their posters to the many visitors and judges who came to see them. Caroline Zackerman explains her poster to a visitor at UURAF 2024. Drake Howard explains his poster to a UURAF 2024 visitor. Students' talks and abstracts Gage Landeryou ExpressING Gender: The Effect of Situational Comfort on (ING) Pronunciation in Transgender Speech This study explores sociolinguistic variation in the speech of binary transgender individuals. My main goal is to investigate how a speaker's comfort with their own gender expression impacts how much they style shift in their pronunciation of (ING) (e.g., pronouncing "running" either as running or runnin') between queer-friendly settings (like their home) versus public settings. Following the methodology of Gratton (2016), who found nonbinary individuals style shifting between private and public settings to avoid the threat of misgendering, I conducted sociolinguistic interviews with 4 binary trans individuals. Each person was interviewed first in their home, and then in a public and not explicitly queer-friendly environment (like a coffee shop). Interviews were transcribed and time aligned, and auditorily coded for pronunciation of (ING). The primary research question was: do trans speakers use their pronunciation of (ING) in public settings to mitigate the threat of being misgendered, in the same way that the nonbinary speakers in Gratton (2016) do?Presenter(s): Mentor: Betsy Sneller (Linguistics) Caroline Zackerman Canadian Raising and Metalinguistic Awareness in Michigan English Canadian Raising is a phonological rule by which the /ay/ diphthong raises before voiceless coda consonants (as in the word PRICE) (Chambers 1973). Speakers of Michigan English do exhibit regular Canadian Raising of /ay/; however, they often consider Canadian Raising to be a uniquely…

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Alumni / Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / People / Research

Socio Lab goes to New York City for NWAV 51

October 16, 2023

Adam Barnhardt presents "Not all sound changes in progress are used in early-adolescent stance-taking" Suzanne Wagner and Jack Rechsteiner in front of Wagner, Sneller & Rechsteiner's poster "Sociolinguistic research projects as brands" at NWAV 51. Betsy Sneller points to a diagram of the Northern Cities shift. Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Wagner, Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, Adam Barnhardt, and Shannon Harasta at NWAV 51. The MSU Sociolinguistics Lab was well represented at the NWAV 51 conference at Queens College, New York, October 13-15, 2023. We had presentations on some of our first analyses of linguistic data from the MI Diaries project: Dr. Betsy Sneller presented as first author on a talk about Michigan English vowel change in apparent time, and Linguistics PhD students Adam Barnhardt and Yongqing Ye presented their doctoral qualifying paper research on adolescent stance-taking and vowel nasalization respectively. In addition, we had a poster that described our experience of building the MI Diaries 'brand' over the last three years. We were pleased to include new first year Second Language Studies student Shannon Harasta, who presented her MA thesis research (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) on queer individuals' sense of (dis)comfort with various audiences. And it would not be NWAV without a gathering of MSU Socio Lab alumni and associates, such as Dr. Monica Nesbitt (U Indiana Bloomington), Jack Rechsteiner (U Pittsburgh), Chun-Yi Peng (Borough of Manhattan Community College) and Jayce Garner (Pomona College and MI Diaries NSF-REU 2022).

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Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Wagner, Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, Adam Barnhardt, and Shannon Harasta at NWAV 51.

Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Undergraduates

Grandparents University 2023

September 27, 2023

MSU Grandparents University is an opportunity for grandparents and grandchildren (ages 8-12) to come together for a three-day educational experience while spending time together on the MSU campus in the summer. This past summer, MSU Sociolinguistics led two courses.

As usual, we ran Harry Potter and the Secrets of British English, which has been a hit at Grandparents University since 2009! In this session, participants are whisked off to Hogwarts for classes in Potions (British/US English madlibs), Charms (IPA transcription), Defense Against the Dark Arts (British regional accents) and History of Magic (a brief lecture on language change).

And we had a new course: Diary of a Michigan Kid. In this class, we taught participants about keeping an audio diary, pronunciation differences, and generational differences in language. All of the activities and materials were co-designed by faculty and students on the lab’s MI Diaries project team. We think that the “Kids vs Grands” activity was the most fun. See below for some pictures from Diary of a Michigan Kid.

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