New England English Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics and Dialectology

by Stanford, James N.

• ISBN13: 9780190625658
• ISBN10: 0190625651
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2019-11-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in the popular imagination. While other projects have studied various dialect regions of New England, this is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. In New England English, James N. Stanford presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recently collected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. Stanford and his team of Dartmouth students built this dataset over 8 years of face-to-face fieldwork and online audio recordings and questionnaires.

Using acoustic phonetics, computational processing, and dialect maps, the book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of geography, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors. This dataset is interpreted in terms of William Labov's outward orientation of the language faculty, dialect levelling, convergence and divergence, and "Hub social geometry." The result is a wide-ranging empirical analysis and theoretical overview of this influential English dialect region.

Author Biography

James N. Stanford is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Dartmouth College. He studies dialects and language variation using quantitative sociolinguistic methods and acoustic sociophonetics, and is co-editor of Language Regard: Methods, Variation and Change (2018) and Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (2009).

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I: Setting the Stage
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Linguistic Variables
Chapter 3: Early Founders and the Founder Effect

Part II: Bird's Eye View: The Mechanical Turk Online Project
Chapter 4: Results from the Mechanical Turk Online Audio Recordings
Chapter 5: Results from the Mechanical Turk Online Written Questionnaires

Part III: Exploring the Hub: Fieldwork Results from Eastern Massachusetts
Chapter 6: Fieldwork results from eastern Massachusetts
Chapter 7: Focus on subgroups within the Hub

Part IV: Exploring Northern New England: Fieldwork Results
Chapter 8: Fieldwork results from northeastern New England
Chapter 9: Focus on subgroups of northern New England

Part V: Summary and Discussion
Chapter 10: Summary of empirical results
Chapter 11: Outward orientation, leveling, and Hub social geometry

Appendix A: Primary Field Interview Materials
Appendix B: Field Interview Materials for the New Hampshire/Vermont Border Study
Appendix C: The Mechanical Turk Self-Reporting Questionnaire
Appendix D: The Mechanical Turk Audio Survey
Appendix E: Information about the publicly available database: Dartmouth New England English Database (DNEED)

References