Linguistics

Sign phonetics is the study of the physical transmission of signed language via the movement of the arms, hands and fingers. The goal of this study is to examine phonetic reduction in American Sign Language (ASL), specifically the occurrence and physical extent of sign lowering. Just as words are hypoarticulated during fast or casual speech, signs also undergo phonetically-induced reduction in the form of raising or lowering. We are focusing on the phonetic realization of signs produced at the forehead. Adult native users of ASL produced forehead-located signs adjacent to signs with either high or low locations and at three signing rates. Signing data were collected via an opto-electronic motion capture system. Vertical displacement of the hand was measured relative to a body-centered coordinate scheme, and the hand’s vertical displacement served as the measure of sign location. Preliminary data suggest that some forehead-located signs are lowered at faster signing rates. Lowering v...

Stance has been used increasingly as an important theoretical and analytical term in the study of language and social interaction. Most importantly, it has been deployed as a way to make connections between macro-level social identities and ideologies and what actually happens when people are talking to each other face to face. For all of this analytical success and fervor, stance is still a remarkably contested concept; it is still not clear that all researchers use the term in a similar way, and especially whether they agree on the linguistic resources a  speaker can use to make a stance claim. In this paper I propose three main axes of stance and some linguistic resources for indicating these axes. While keeping in mind that stances are always negotiated and interactionally created in context, I propose three main axes: Alignment, affect, and investment. In order to demonstrate how these axes work, I consider how the word ‘just’ does alignment work in two conversations, considering how aspects of its contexts of use combine with its particular meaning and indexicalities to assert stance. I show how the single word modifies the three axes to differing degrees, and propose a heuristic for stance analysis.

Older adults, baffled by the new forms of language that regularly appear in youth cultures, frequently characterize young people's language as “inarticulate,” and then provide examples that illustrate the specific forms of linguistic mayhem performed by “young people nowadays. For American teenagers, these examples usually include the discourse marker like, rising final intonation on declaratives, and the address term dude, which is cited as an example of the _ inarticulateness of young men in particular.

Participants Mary Bucholtz (University of California, Santa Barbara)< bucholtz@ linguistics. ucsb. edu> Elaine Chun (University of South Carolina)< echun@ mail. utexas. edu> Nikolas Coupland (Cardiff University)< coupland@ cardiff. ac. uk> Maeve Eberhardt (University of Pittsburgh)< maeve. eberhardt@ gmail. com> Scott Kiesling (University of Pittsburgh)< kiesling@ pitt. edu> Norma Mendoza-Denton (University of Arizona)< nmd@ u. arizona. edu> Natalie Schilling-Estes (Georgetown University)< ns3@ georgetown. edu>

Changes from above the level of awareness have not been the subject of much sociolinguistic investigation since Labov's (1966) investigation of New York department stores. However, many dialect'contractions' show aspects of change from above, as in Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1995).