Faculty – Page 4 – Sociolinguistics Lab

Chapter on Lansing sound change in Low Back Merger Shift book

February 29, 2020

Some of the lab’s ongoing research into sound change in the Lansing area has been published as a chapter in The Low Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Shifts across North America, edited by Kara Becker. Our chapter is titled “A tale of two shifts: Movement toward the Low Back Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan“, and it’s authored by Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Alexander Mason. We provide a preliminary sketch of the advance of the Low Back Merger Shift (what we have previously called the ‘Elsewhere Shift’ in other work) among Lansing speakers born in the 1900s through the 1990s.

Faculty / Graduate Students / Publications

MSU people in the new Penn Working Papers

October 10, 2018

In time for NWAV 47, the selected papers from NWAV 46 have just been released. Edited by Jordan Kodner and Lacey Wade, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 24.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 46 includes articles by MSU researchers Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Sayako Uehara:

Nesbitt, Monica. Economic change and the decline of raised TRAP in Lansing, MI.
Uehara, Sayako and Suzanne Evans Wagner. Progressive outliers in listener perception of sound change.

Both papers explore the sound change in progress we’re observing in Michigan from the Northern Cities Shift to a new vowel system that has various names in the literature, including the Elsewhere Shift, the Low Back Merger Shift and the Third Dialect.

Conferences / Faculty / Graduate Students

Congratulations to NWAV 47 Presenters!

September 27, 2018

The Sociolinguistics lab will be sending many projects to the 47th Annual NWAV Conference at New York University in New York City from October 18-21, 2018, including several talks! Congratulations to Silvina Bongiovanni, Monica Nesbitt, Matt Savage, and Alex Mason for getting accepted!

There will be practice talks in the weeks leading up to the conference, and all are invited to attend lab meetings to learn more and/or provide feedback!

Please see the Sociolinguistics lab calendar for specific dates of each practice talk!

TRAP: The loss of tensing in Michigan (Monica Nesbitt)
Style & attitude: The social evaluation of the BET vowel (Matt Savage & Alex Mason)
On the relationship between vowel nasalization and nasal weakening: Evidence from a Caribbean and non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish (Silvina Bongiovanni)
It’s a TRAP!: The trigger for the Elsewhere Shift in Lansing, Michigan (Alex Mason)
Attitudes toward TRAP in Michigan (Monica Nesbitt)
“It’s an American Symbol!”: Non-native speakers’ take on remarkable LIKE (Irina Zaykovskaya) – Practice Talk: October 5, 2018; Wells Hall B243; 12:30pm-3:00pm via Skype