Researcher choice and overlooked variables: A "bottom-up" reanalysis of Villarreal (2018)

Dan Villarreal (Pitt Linguistics)

An immense body of sociolinguistic research has demonstrated how social processes (from macrosocial structures to momentary identity performance) are reflected and reproduced in speakers' production and perception of individual linguistic variables. The approach of isolating individual variables for investigation, despite being clearly fruitful, misses two critical facts about language variation in actual use. First is variable co-occurrence: variables do not exist in isolation. In between tokens of the individual variable under investigation are numerous socially meaningful variables (some in structurally related changes) that may mediate or change the social meanings of the studied variable. Second is researcher choice: the process by which we choose what to investigate may lead us to miss meaningful variation. The present study attempts to address these shortcomings using "bottom-up" methods to investigate Californian listeners' attitudes toward a multiplicity of co-occurring vowel variables, comparing these variables' influence on social meanings to previous research on California vowels.

To investigate this question, my co-author, James Grama, and I re-analyzed the results of my earlier matched-guise research on California English perceptions (Villarreal 2018). In that study, 97 Californian listeners rated excerpts from a cartoon-retell task (produced by 12 Californian speakers) on 12 attribute scales. Because stimuli were spontaneously produced (albeit all on the same topic), they all contained slightly different content and thus different vowel variables. Aside from the two vowels acoustically manipulated into guises (TRAP and GOOSE), all other vowel phonemes were left to vary naturally. The original analysis found that, despite substantial variance in attribute ratings overall, guise significantly affected three scales—suggesting stimuli contained additional socially meaningful variation that guise failed to capture.

To model this variation, we treated each stimulus as a "bag of features", mirroring "bag-ofwords" approaches to text corpora (Jurafsky & Martin 2022). These comprised vowel changes that are well-attested in California English (TRAP, DRESS, KIT, GOOSE, GOAT, LOT/THOUGHT), marginally attested (FOOT, STRUT), and largely unattested (FLEECE, FACE, PRICE). Vowels' F1 and F2 measurements were normalized and translated to discrete features using Atlas of North American English benchmarks (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006). For each attribute, we used the Boruta algorithm (Kursa, Jankowski & Rudnicki 2010), via the Boruta package in R (Kursa & Rudnicki 2010), to determine which features influenced scale ratings.

This reanalysis revealed that vowels that are changing (or have changed) in California English did not necessarily impact social meanings more than those with marginal or no evidence of change. The most impactful variable, FOOT, is rarely investigated in California despite being structurally related to well-attested GOOSE and GOAT fronting; FLEECE, which is almost completely unattested as undergoing change, outranked several well-attested California English variables. In addition, despite the historical ordering of Low-Back-Merger Shift (Becker 2019) sound changes (TRAP then DRESS then KIT), TRAP and KIT impacted social meanings more than DRESS.

I argue that these findings reveal a need for greater attention to variable co-occurrence in modeling language variation. While variable co-occurrence is a known problem in sociolinguistics, actually accounting for it in practice is challenging. I suggest that bottom-up approaches like that described here can account for variable co-occurrence while mitigating the potential bias introduced by researcher choice.

Lindley Winchester, class of 2014, will join us for our 4th Annual Linguistics Homecoming event. 

“A world beyond this one”: Sustaining afro-brasilidade through language, ritual, and culture teaching in northeastern Brazil

Adrienne Ronee Washington (she/her/hers)

Theories on the intersections of language and race (raciolinguistics, Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015) and on the semiotics of race (raciosemiotics, Smalls, 2015, 2020) are positioned well to understand how multiple identities co-craft personhood, that is, how language informs race, ethnoracial formations, and racism, and also how they recursively shape language. Yet such theories have not been regularly applied in exploring the place of religion (along with language and race) in identity co-construction, including intersectional hierarchies and the contestations of such hegemonic power formations by members of multiply marginalized groups.

Building upon language and religion scholarship and raciolinguistics (including principally raciosemiotics), this research advances racioreligious linguistic ideologies as a concept to examine the discursive processes through which language, race, and spirituality become entangled within cultural lenses. I begin by exploring racialization of Yoruba-inspired (Nagô in Bahia) spiritualities and linguistic/semiotic practices under colonialism and racial slavery and then continue into the modern context, where Nagô/Yoruba has come to epitomize Blackness. I present an extended example of racioreligious linguistic ideologies in the Brazilian city of Salvador within a school where educators teach Nagô/Yoruba as part of an effort to inform students about African-matrix histories and cultures and develop positive identities.

Qualitative analyses of interview, participant observation, and photographic data highlight how interlocutors in this community, working within affirmative racioreligious linguistic ideologies and the values they assign to personhood, ritual knowledge, and language practices, engage in education as racioreligious identity work to resist systemic racial, religious, and linguistic prejudices, sustain traditional knowledge, and affirm Blackness. This work is instructive for other contexts where religious thinking has inspired ideas of essentialized differences, and it opens space for an explicit interrogation of how religious supremacy, in cooperation with systemic racial and linguistic privileges, has participated in subordination and has necessitated counterdiscursive strategies.