US Regional Dialects Vowel Shifting in Northern Arizona Towns and Ranchlands Lauren Hall-Lew My current primary research project is an English dialect survey of Northern Arizona, which includes the study of the general Western US vowel shifts, focusing on the fronted production of the vowels in words like boat and boot, and the raising of the vowel in ban. My data focuses on the residents of my hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona, and the ranchers who live in the surrounding areas. On the initial impression that these ranchers' speech patterns differ from the townies', my research goals have shifted from a basic dialect survey to an interest in people's connections to the land and to particular land-based lifestyles. Along with fellow graduate student Mary Rose, who conducted a year's worth of ethnographic research in rural Wisconsin, I'm looking at the way people talk in Arizona and what their way of speaking says about their real and imagined connections to the place and time in which they reside. Hall-Lew, Lauren. (To appear). One Shift, Two Groups: When fronting alone is not enough. University of Philadelphia Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: Selected Papers from NWAVE 32. Rose, Mary and Lauren Hall-Lew. Linguistic Variation and the Rural Imaginary. NWAV33. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2004. Hall-Lew, Lauren. May 2004. "Arizona's Not So Standard English." LanguageMagazine. <http://www.languagemagazine.com> Hall-Lew, Lauren. Between Communities: Southwestern US English. American Dialect Society. Boston, Mass., January 2004. Hall-Lew, Lauren. One shift, two groups: When fronting along is not enough. NWAV 32. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, October 2003. Hall-Lew, Lauren and Malcah Yaeger-Dror. Totally California? The Occurrence of (ow)-fronting in Arizona English. NWAV 31. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 2002. The Northern California Vowel Shift Penelope Eckert Ethnographic study of the relation between variation in Northern California Vowels and the emergence of a preadolescent social order. (See my web page on the elementary school study) The Northern Cities Shift Penelope Eckert Ethnographic Study of variation among suburban Detroit adolescents. (See my web page on the high school study) The Urban-Rural Interface in Wisconsin Mary Rose This dissertation study is based on ethnographic fieldwork among older people in a town in Wisconsin, examining the structure of variation at the borders of town and farm. It focuses on the vowel system, most particularly the monophthongization (and rediphthongization) of /ey/ and /ow/. Rebecca Greene This dissertation, still in the data-collection process and as-yet-untitled, focuses on several issues surrounding Appalachian English, as it is spoken in my hometown in rural Elliott County, in Northeastern Kentucky. Has Appalachian English died out, or is it just changing toward more phonetically-based variation? Is it converging toward Southern English? How are negative and/or

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US Ethnic Dialects Negative Inversion in African American Vernacular English Peter Sells, John R. Rickford, Tom Wasow. This research involved a detailed investigation of negative inversion in African American Vernacular English [AAVE], in examples like "Don't nobody move" and "Ain't nothing happenin." Drawing on examples collected from real life, from literature, and from the intuitive judgements of native speakers, we proposed a new optimality theory analysis of this construction, one of the central features of AAVE. "Negative Inversion in African American Vernacular English" in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14.3:591-627. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. 1993. White speakers of AAVE Julie Sweetland Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find you have created a type. Begin with a type, and you find you have created nothing. --F. Scott Fitzgerald Julie's work on white speakers' use of African American Vernacular English takes the stance that the first lines of Fitzgerald's story RThe Rich BoyS ountryhave much to offer traditional sociolinguistic theory, whose explanatory power is limited by its unproblematized reliance on sociological categories. In particular, her work seeks to complicate our understanding of a RtypeS frequently mentioned in the literature: the RspeakerS of AAVE. Sweetland (2002) documents the strategies of authentication used by RDelilahS, a white woman who works as a hairdresser in an African American salon and draws heavily on AAVE syntax. More recent work (2004) investigates the ways in which a white woman who was raised in predominantly African American neighborhood uses AAVE in style-shifting in order to emphasize various aspects of her identity. Sweetland, Julie. 2002. Unexpected but authentic use of an ethnically-marked dialect. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6:514-536. Sweetland, Julie. 2004. An Interesting Predicament: AAVE as a Stylistic Resource in a White Individual's Linguistic Repertoire. Qualifying paper, bStanford University Department of Linguistics. Syntactic Variation and Linguistic Competence Emily Bender (advisors: Penny Eckert, Tom Wasow, John Rickford, Arnold Zwicky, Ivan Sag) This dissertation study investigates the relationship of non-categorical constraints on sociolinguistic variation to competence grammar, based on a case study of copula absence in AAVE. The main thesis is that social and grammatical constraints on variation interact such that variants produced in a disfavoring environment express their social meaning more emphatically. A small-scale experiment provides suggestive evidence in support of this thesis. I argue that the experimental data (together with all of the community-study data on patterned syntactic variation) motivate a rethinking of the boundaries of competence grammar. In particular, we should reconsider whether social meanings, frequency information, and over-specified grammatical constructions should be included. Bender, Emily M. To appear. Variation and Formal Theories of Grammar: HPSG. In Brown, Keith (editor-in-chief). The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition. Oxford: Elsevier Publishers. Bender, Emily M. To appear. On the boundaries of linguistic competence: Matched-guise experiments as evidence of knowledge of grammar. In Borsley, Robert D., ed. Lingua: Special volume on data in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. 2001 Syntactic Variation and Linguistic Competence: The Case of AAVE Copula Absence.Phd Thesis. Stanford University. http://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/dissertation/ Bender, Emily. 2000. Non-categorical constraints in perception. In Minnick Fox, Michelle, Alexander Williams, and Elsi Kaiser, eds. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7(1). pp.~15--26. the lives of Appalachian English speakers, and how may it have done so in the past? I used sociolinguistic interviews to collect linguistic data. My information on language ideologies will come from interviews, subjective reaction tests, media, and dialect coaches. The language attitudes of native residents of urban Lexington, Kentucky, will be compared to the language attitudes of Elliott Countians. Bender, Emily. 1999. Constituting context: Null objects in English recipes revisited.In Alexander, Jim, Na-Rae Han, and Michelle Minnick Fox, eds. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 6(1). pp.~53--68. The Midwest Whose California Shift? Chicano and Anglo reverse shifts in Northern California Penelope Eckert Based on an ethnographic study in two schools in adjacent neighborhoods in a Northern California city, this study examines ethnic variation in the Northern California Vowel Shift in the speech of late elementary school kids. (See my web page on the elementary school study)

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Other Languages Phonological Variation in Shanghai Mandarin R. L. Starr and Dan Jurafsky A corpus study of 100 speakers of Shanghai Mandarin, examining variation in the retroflex-alveolar distinction in relation to social variables age, gender, and education. Paper presented at NWAV 2004 (Abstract) Changing economics, changing markets: A sociolinguistic study of Chinese yuppies Qing Zhang This 2001 dissertation compared the use of a range of local variables in the speech of two groups of managers in Beijing Mandarin: Managers in foreign-based financial companies and managers in state-owned businesses. Managers in the foreign-owned businesses, commonly referred to as RChinese yuppiesS, were shown to be constructing a cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin, whereas the managers in state-owned businesses made greater use of local Beijing phonology. The work showed complex gender interactions, as a function of the kinds of personae women and men can successfully construct in the two work settings. This work also demonstrated that variation can be an integral part of social change. Tongzhi, Ideologies, and Semantic Change Andrew Wong Based on archival research, participant-observation and face-to-face interviews, this dissertation is a sociolinguistic and ethnographic study of the role of ideology in semantic change. Focusing on the on-going change in meaning of the Chinese word tongzhi from 'comrade' to 'sexual minorities' in Hong Kong, it investigates: (1) the actuation of this semantic change; (2) the extent to which this semantic change has spread from gay rights activists to other social groups (e.g. other lesbians and gay men, mainstream newspapers); and (3) how tongzhi is used differently from similar labels such as gay and tongxinglian zhe 'homosexual.' A popular address term in Communist China, tongzhi was appropriated by the gay rights activists in Hong Kong as a term of reference for sexual minorities in the late 1980s. While historical linguists have explored the conditions for and the causes of semantic change, sociolinguists have developed theories to account for the pejoration of social category labels. Since they study changes that took place in the past, they are unable to capture the social contexts and the discourse conditions in which changes occurred. To resolve this issue, my dissertation examines a semantic change in progress and adopts an approach that emphasizes meanings emergent in discourse rather than decontextualized meanings. Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) The re-appropriation of tongzhi. Language in Society. 34 (5). Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) New directions in the study of language and sexuality (Review Article). Journal of Sociolinguistics. 9 (1) Wong, Andrew. (forthcoming, 2005) Language, cultural authenticity, and the tongzhi movement. Proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium about Society and Language - Austin. Austin, TX: Department of Linguistics. Clark, Eve and Andrew Wong. (2002) Pragmatic directions about language use: Words and word meanings. Language in Society. 31(2): 181-212. Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds.). (2002) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew. (2002) The semantic derogation of tongzhi: A synchronic perspective. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts, and Andrew Wong (eds.). Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. 161-174. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew, Sarah Roberts and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. (2002) Speaking of sex. In Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert Podesva, Sarah Roberts and Andrew Wong (eds.). Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. 1-21. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Wong, Andrew and Qing Zhang. (2000) The linguistic construction of the tongzhi community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 10(2): 248-278. Wong, Andrew. (2000) Explicit introductions in lexical acquisition: A case study. Issues in Applied Linguistics. 11(2): 149-174. Dialects of Irish on Teilifis na Gaeile R. L. Starr A study of the use of dialects of Irish Gaelic on the Irish-language television station Teilifis na Gaeilge. Discusses the roles of traditional rural varieties and emerging urban varieties of Irish in the media. Undergraduate thesis. Harvard University (Abstract) Soulatan Gascon Penelope Eckert Based on several years of fieldwork in the commune of Soulan in the Pyrenees, this research examines phonological variation in contemporary Gascon, and in the historical changes from Latin. It also examines language ideology in the bilingual setting. (See my Gascon webpage)

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