Margaret Jacks Hall, Bldg 460
Stanford, CA 94305-2150
B A C K G R O U N D
I am a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. Part of my work focuses on the English dialects used in the Southwestern US state of Arizona. I was raised in the town of Flagstaff, Arizona, and I attended college at the UofA in Tucson, Arizona. I began fieldwork with native Flagstaffians in the summer of 2002. I expanded my fieldwork to interviews with cattle ranchers from across the state in the summer of 2004. All of my analyses so far have described the speech of European Americans in the area, although I have and plan to collect more data from local Navajo, Hopi, African American, Asian American, and Latin American speakers.
Most of my work details the phonetic differences between individual speakers, looking specifically at their vowel systems. My recent interests also extend to the lexicon and some syntactic properties. Although I have only described a few vowel characteristics in detail, I've created this website due to the urging of my fellow sociolinguists to document some of the still uninvestigated linguistic features that have caught my attention along the way. As a result, Finally, this website is subject to change and clarification as the science continues to corroborate or disprove these impressions.
In my work I argue that cattle ranchers use a different linguistic system than that of the people in Flagstaff. For that reason, all linguistic properties below are labeled according linguistic community. As a researcher, however, it is important to keep in mind that these communities and their labels vary between individual speakers and are subject to constant renegotiation.
P H O N O L O G Y
• fronted (uw), as in boot -- {town, ranch}
• fronted (ow), as in boat -- {town}
• raised (ae) before nasals, as in can -- {town}
• fronted (^), as in cut -- {ranch}
• merger of (a) and (-), a.k.a. the cot/caught merger -- {town; ranch participation unknown}
• merger of (I) and (E) before nasals, a.k.a. the pin/pen merger -- {ranch}
• monophthongization of (ay), as in ride -- {ranch}
• /t/ in drought pronounced as a theta, as in It's been droughthy this year -- {ranch, unique to this word}
• both Town and Ranch are /r/-ful dialects.
L E X I C O N & S Y N T A X
• ranching specific terms, as in cattle breed names -- {ranch}
• use of common count nouns as mass nouns, as in We have a lot of cow this year. -- {ranch}
• use of deictic them, as in Over in them hills. -- {ranch}
W R I T I N G S
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2005. One Shift, Two Groups: When fronting alone is not enough. University of Philadelphia Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: Selected Papers from NWAVE 32.
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2004. The Western Vowel Shift in Northern Arizona. First Qualifying Paper. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Hall-Lew, Lauren. May 2004. "Arizona's Not So Standard English." LanguageMagazine. http://www.languagemagazine.com. REPRINTED in:
American Voices: How dialects differ from coast to coast.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
See also: Conner, Richard Clay. 1997. The Fronting of /uw/ and /ow/ in Native Phoenicians' Speech: On the Dialect Map at Last. Thesis for Master of Arts. Arizona State University.