here - Linguistic Society of America

Nathan A Severance (Dartmouth College) Session 5Kenneth P. Baclawski, Jr. (Dartmouth College)James N. Stanford (Dartmouth College)Interrupted transmission: a study of Eastern New England dialect features in rural central New HampshireLabov (2007, 2010) finds that parent-to-child transmission typically occurs in an “unbroken sequence,” as each new generation ofchildren faithfully acquires the dialect features of the local speech community. Under what circumstances can generational dialecttransmission be interrupted? Can the chain of dialect transmission be suddenly broken between two consecutive generations ordoes it require more time? Our new fieldwork and sociophonetic analysis in rural central New Hampshire shows that thetransmission of traditional Eastern New England features (non-rhoticity, fronted-FATHER and other features) is being interruptedbetween two consecutive generations as younger speakers are leveling toward a supra-regional standard.Michael Shepherd (Arizona State University) Session 15Critical discourse analysis of synchronic and diachronic variation in institutional turn-allocationThis paper examines two discursive strategies primary-school teachers use in allocating turns: (1) calling on students without theirhaving volunteered and (2) soliciting volunteers then selecting among them. Studies in the 1970s found teachers used strategy 1primarily, but data from 2008 suggest strategy 2 now predominates. Adjacency-pair and functional analyses show strategy 1 canpromote equitable participation—by allowing selection of any student—but risks dispreferred responses. Strategy 2 helps avoiddispreferred responses with a volunteer-soliciting presequence, but a regression analysis reveals it disadvantages less-outgoingstudents by making how often one volunteers the overwhelming determiner of his/her participation opportunities.Stephanie Shih (Stanford University/University of California, Berkeley) Session 20The similarity basis for consonant-tone interaction as Agreement by CorrespondenceThis paper addresses the on-going debate over the distinction between Agreement by Correspondence and the previouslydominant theory of autosegmental feature-spreading, focusing on a key conceptual difference between the two theories: the roleof similarity in harmony patterns. Using data from consonant-tone interaction in Dioula d’Odienné, I propose that sonorityunderlies the relationship between segments and tone. Agreement by Correspondence’s unique ability to make direct reference tosimilarity in determining segmental agreement makes it better suited for handling phenomena like consonant-tone interaction.Dwan Lee Shipley (Western Washington University) Session 71A cross-linguistic comparative analysis of the toponymy of Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany in FranceThe place names of these three regions will be compared linguistically and toponymically for their similarities and contrasts. Thethree areas of investigation were originally and continue to be inhabited by people of Celtic linguistic origins. The Celticlanguages fall into two groups: (a) the Brythonic group, and (b) the Gaelic group. Breton and Cornish belong to the Brythonicgroup. Manx is a member of the Gaelic group.Cara Shousterman (New York University) Session 58Speaking English in Spanish Harlem: dialect change in Puerto Rican EnglishWhile much research in the field of social dialectology has focused on African American English and to a lesser extent PuertoRican English, the interaction between these two nonstandard dialects remains relatively under-investigated. The current studyexplores how community change is reflected in language, by examining the English of U.S-born Puerto Rican-identified speakersacross several generations who live in East Harlem and report varying amounts of contact with African Americans. This researchoffers perspective on how and why urban dialects change over time by looking at prosodic rhythm—measured using the PairwiseVariability Index--across different generations of speakers.Kobey Shwayder (University of Pennsylvania) Session 17Morphologically sensitive phonology in Maltese and MakassareseIn the study of morphophonology, there is an empirical question of when and how much of the phonology and morphology areable to access each other. I present two case studies, Maltese syncope under 1pl subject agreement versus 1pl object cliticizationand Makassarese stress shift under clitics, in which there is an asymmetry in the output of a phonological rule to a root based on adifference in features of a nearby morpheme. This suggests an architecture in which the phonology to have at least some accessto morphological features of nearby morphosyntactic objects.203