Sociolinguistics and North American English
I work on dialect variation in U.S. English in terms of regional distribution, changes in progress, and stylistic use. I'm interested in both intra-speaker variation, such as register and stylistic differences, and inter-speaker variation, particularly in the different social groups' perceptions of phonetic variables. My research centers on community studies, where I believe linguists can best understand how speakers index complex interactions between local social meanings and broader regional membership. Much of my work is influenced by that of Stanford Professors Penny Eckert and John Rickford.
Sociolinguistics and Akan
I'm also interested the phonology of Akan, spoken in Southern Ghana. The Akan dialects include the Twi ethnic and geographical varieties of Akuapem and Asante which are closely related to another major Akan dialect, Fante. I'm interested in Twi phonology, dialect variation and register variation, as well as speaker attitudes of dialect prestige. My current work with Akan is co-authoring a new Twi language learning textbook for speakers of English with Professor Adams Bodomo and Dr. Charles Marfo.
Dissertation
Ethnicity and Phonetic Variation in a San Francisco Neighborhood*
This dissertation advances research in sociolinguistics by analyzing phonetic variation in a majority Asian American community in San Francisco, California. As one of the first community studies focusing on Asian Americans in an urban US context, this work speaks to ongoing discussions about speaker ethnicity, phonetic variation, and regional sound change. The analyses shows Asian Americans sharing the same changes in apparent time as their European American cohorts. In some cases, the correlation with speaker age is even more robust within the Asian American speaker sample than within the European American sample. I argue that this pattern is particularly likely given the social history of San Francisco and the history of the particular community.
The community of study is the Sunset District, a large residential neighborhood in western San Francisco. The area has undergone a relatively rapid demographic shift since the 1970s. Today its population is approximately 52\% Asian American and 48\% European American. Generational differences among neighborhood residents are prominent, in terms of how residents characterize and relate to their community. These changing prestige values map onto the emergence of competing linguistic markets. The phonetic analysis draws on these ethnographic insights in an effort to explore the social meaning of particular variants and the motivations behind participation in local sound change.
The variables analyzed are two well-known features of sound change in U.S. English: the merger of the low back vowel classes, as in LOT and THOUGHT, and the fronting of the nuclei of the mid- and high back vowels, as in GOOSE and GOAT.
The results show that residents of San Francisco's Sunset District are moving towards the low back merger in apparent time. This development, shown through correlations between production measures and speaker age, is in occurring in parallel with other regions of the West. Specific to San Francisco, however, is that some speakers still maintain this phonemic distinction, regardless of age. While ethnic variation does not predict vocalic variation, Asian Americans show change in apparent time towards low back merger, while the correlation among European Americans is not significant. Furthermore, while speaker sex class does not predict vocalic variation, women exhibit change in apparent time towards more merger, while the correlation among men is not significant. Other trend correlations among speaker subsets suggest that some speakers may be orienting towards a broader and newer regional pattern of merger, while other speakers may be orienting to a more local and older linguistic market that grants prestige to the low back distinction.
The analysis of mid- and high back vowel fronting shows that Sunset residents are moving toward more fronted productions for both vowel classes, with significant correlations between fronting measures and speaker age across the speaker sample. The pattern for the GOAT vowel is similar to low back merger: while ethnic variation does not predict vocalic variation, Asian Americans show change in apparent time towards GOAT-fronting, while the correlation among European Americans is not significant. In contrast, the fronting of the GOOSE vowel does not appear to vary according to speaker ethnicity or within ethnic subsamples. Instead, while speaker sex class does not predict variation in GOOSE, in the environment following an anterior coronal, women show change in apparent time towards more fronted variants, while the correlation among men is not significant.
The sociolinguistics literature contains relatively little work on phonetic variation in the English of Asian Americans, and there is an increasing interest in research exploring the complex interactions between ethnic and regional identities. This dissertation speaks to these gaps, and further argues that Asian American ethnicities are integral to San Franciscan identities and ideologies of place.
*You can download the dissertation here [PDF], for free. In return, please let me know about any typos or larger errors you come across (email me at lauren1 at gmail dot com). I'm also always open to more general suggestions on the improvement of this document. Thank you for your interest!
Projects
Multiple Measures of L-Vocalization
The vocalization of coda-/l/ (where "cold" sounds like "code") is notoriously difficult to measure acoustically. My collaborator Sonya Fix and I are launching a project that will compare multiple methods of L-vocalization: auditory coding across multiple trained listeners, various acoustic measures, and potential articulatory measures as well. This project is in its early stages, so watch this space!
Variation in the 'Iraq' Vowels
Any observer of the U.S. media knows that the word Iraq varies according to both the first vowel {ay, Ih, iy} and the second vowel {ae, ah}. With collaborators Elizabeth Coppock and Rebecca Starr, I hypothesized that, for the first vowel, the (ay) variant indexes political conservatism and the (iy) and (Ih) vowel both index political liberalism. We further hypothesized that, for the second vowel, the (ae) variant indexes political conservativism and the (ah) variant indexes political liberalism. We have significant results from the U.S. House of Representatives supporting our hypothesis for the second vowel, but not for the first vowel. These findings remain significant when controlling for geographical region and regional accent. However, results from a comparison of U.S. news media (FoxNews and NPR) are inconclusive. A write-up of this project is currently under view for publication.
Country Talk
"Country Talk" has a significant role in U.S. national identity, yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to its production and perception as a linguistic variety. While Country Talk shares ideological ties to Southern US English, it can't be simply defined as a regional dialect. And although "country" overlaps conceptually with rurality, research clearly show that rural accents abound in the United States that are not known by the speakers as Country Talk. We present some preliminary answers to this question based on the linguistic attitudes held by self-identified speakers of Country Talk. Based on this data we argue that Country Talk is a unique speech variety that is defined by ideological representations that differ by speaker and by community. This analysis is in collaboration with fellow PhD student Nola Stephens. A write-up of this project is currently under view for publication.
Northern Arizona English
I am conducting ongoing analysis of the vowel patterns and other linguistic variation recorded in interviews with urban and rural speakers from Northern Arizona in 2002-2004. Early versions of this work tracked the spread of California sound changes in the speech of local residents of Flagstaff, Arizona. The second stage of this research is in collaboration with Mary Rose, currently at The Ohio State University. The project investigates the linguistic creation of rural American identities, in this case a cattle rancher identity, and the implications for understanding rurality as a social variable in variationist research. For some basic information on variation in Northern Arizona English, please visit my Arizona Dialect site (very much a work in progress).
Papers
Rebecca Scarborough, Jason Brenier, Yuan Zhao, Lauren Hall-Lew and Olga Dmitrieva. 2007. An Acoustic Study of Real and Imagined Foreigner-Directed Speech. Publication of the 16th International Conference of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI). 6-10 August, Saarbruecken, Germany. 2165-2168.
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2006. Glides Participate in Harmony: Evidence from Akan Dialects. Second Qualifying Paper. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
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.
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, Sharon Deckert and Lauren Hall-Lew. (2003). Situational variation in intonational strategies. In Leistyna, P. and C. Meyer (eds.). Corpus Analysis: Language Structure & Language Use, Rodopi: Amsterdam.
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah and Lauren Hall-Lew. (2003). Presidential use of negation. In Texas Linguistic Forum 45 (Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Symposium about Language and Society, Austin), 187-194. University of Texas, Austin.
Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, Lauren Hall-Lew and Sharon Deckert. (2002). "It's not or isn't it? Using large corpora todetermine the influences on contraction strategies." Language Variation and Change. 14 (1).
Hall-Lew, Lauren. 2002. English Loanwords in Mandarin Chinese. Unpublished Undergraduate Honors Thesis. The University of Arizona.
Publicity
Hall-Lew, Lauren. May 2004. "Arizona's Not So Standard English." LanguageMagazine. http://www.languagemagazine.com.
REPRINTED in:
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Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward (eds.) 2006. American Voices: How dialects differ from coast to coast. Malden, MA: Blackwell. |