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.
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 Canadian feature and fail to recognize it in their own speech (Niedzielski 1999; Preston 2005). This study investigates the relationship between a speaker of Michigan English’s degree of Canadian Raising and whether or not they report similarities between Canadian English and Michigan English. Tokens of /ay/ are extracted from 8 speakers aged 22 to 40, all born and raised in Michigan. Participants were then asked whether they think that speakers in Michigan sound Canadian. Responses and data are collected from the MI Diaries Project, which collects responses from participants in the MI Diaries project, which sends weekly prompts to over 1,000 diarists, inviting them to self-record their audio responses. As hypothesized, there is a significant relationship between /ay/ height and a speaker’s response to the Canadian question. All speakers exhibit raised /ay/ before voiceless consonants, but this effect is much stronger, resulting in higher /ay/ values, for speakers that reported thinking that Michigan English sounds Canadian. We therefore conclude that awareness of a feature in one’s dialect is correlated with the production of the feature.
Mentor: Betsy Sneller (Linguistics)
Drake Howard and William McLaren
Difficulties in French learning: How can we help?
When learning a second language, many speakers encounter linguistic differences that interfere with or even inhibit their ability to learn this new language. In this study, we explore what specific hurdles and barriers exist for students learning French at the undergraduate level at MSU. The goal of this study is to obtain a better understanding of what particular aspects of the language are perceived by learners as hurdles or difficulties, what teaching and learning strategies are deemed helpful, and what suggestions they can provide to improve the MSU French curriculum and/or their French learning experience. We look at the responses of students in different levels of French (100, 200, 300, 400) who visited the French Learning Center during the spring semester of 2024, and look for commonalities and differences in their self-reported difficulties in various areas of the language, such as pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. We also examine what teaching and learning techniques are the most and least effective according to students, looking to see if there is a pattern or preferred method(s) to better understand and learn French.
Mentor: Anne Violin-Wigent (French)
Lin Cabada, Alyssa Seville, Giovanni Antonio Ramos Loureiro Kizem Rodrigues, Liam Comrie, Brooklyn Bell
Alleviating Homesickness through Magical Practices involving Culture, Heritage, and Family
This project looked at remedies for homesickness through the lenses of varying cultural beliefs, practices, and superstitions with a focus on magical practices. By examining our personal practices, we explored various remedies that people have used for homesickness throughout different regions and historical periods. With this in mind, we researched indigenous literature, religious practices, and the origins of our own practices and beliefs. Using what we found, we executed a piece of original spell work that encompasses the specific historical, magical practices we researched pertaining to homesickness. This was composed through various representations, such as culturally significant deities, symbols and sigils, religious artifacts, and family heirlooms. Our composition is separated into seven categories that represent the movement of the emotional body through the process of remedying homesickness starting with themes of denial, grief, isolation, and ending with acknowledgment, adaptation, and acceptance. Structured as an offering, the final category represents how in order to fully embrace your new life, you must be willing to leave something behind. These components intentionally span across our intersecting identities as students living away from home, relating to our personal experiences with homesickness.
Mentor: David Watson (Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures)
