FOS: Fwd: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium - Laurel MacKenzie

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

FOS and Socio Lab friends,

This week's Linguistics Colloquium talk is not to be missed! The speaker is
Dr Laurel MacKenzie <http://laurelmackenzie.com/> (New York University),
and the talk will be worth your time. Details are below.

Best,

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: smit2297 <smit2297 at msu.edu>
Date: Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 8:54 AM
Subject: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium -
Laurel MacKenzie
To: lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu <lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu>


Good morning,


This is a reminder from the MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee that our
next colloquium is this Thursday, October 19th at 4:30pm, in B342 Wells
Hall. Our speaker is Professor Laurel MacKenzie (New York University),
whose talk is titled "Language change over a very long lifespan" (abstract
below). The rest of the colloquium series schedule can be found on our
website. Please do not hesitate to contact us if there are any questions or
concerns. We hope to see you on Thursday!


Sincerely,

Kaylin Smith and Scott Nelson

MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee Co-Chairs smit2297 at msu.edu,
nelso672 at msu.edu


-----------------------

Language change over a very long lifespan

Laurel MacKenzie (New York University)

Recent work (Sankoff, 2004; Wagner, 2012; Sankoff and Blondeau, 2007) has
demonstrated that linguistic change in later life, though not the norm, is
possible. But there is still much we don't know about this phenomenon: What
kind of change in later life is possible? What causes linguistic change in
later life to take place? And by what grammatical mechanism does change
proceed?

I address these questions through what is to my knowledge the most
high-definition longitudinal study of a single speaker to date. I present
data from a corpus of nature documentary narrations by Sir David
Attenborough from 16 time points across a 60-year period (1956–2015). I use
these recordings to carry out a study of his pronunciation of /r/,
investigating the extent to which he may have participated in a community
change from articulating this segment as a tap to articulating it as a
retroflex approximant (Wells, 1997; Hughes et al., 2012; Cruttenden, 2014;
Fabricius, 2017). I use this data to answer the following questions:

1. Is Attenborough's variation between tap and approximant stable over
time? If not, does he show evidence of participating in the community
change? Is this via a linear trajectory, or does it show a more complicated
diachronic pattern (Rickford & Price, 2013; Stefánsdóttir & Ingason,
forthcoming)?

2. Given that tapped-r may occur in two phonological environments --
word-internally (e.g. *very*) and in hiatus position (e.g. *far away) *--
do we find comparable diachronic trajectories for each environment?

3. Does any attested variation/change show effects of word frequency, as
predicted by exemplar-based models of phonology (Pierrehumbert, 2001; Nycz,
2013)?

The results have implications for the nature and malleability of mental
representations, and the role of individuals in language changes in
progress.

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-- 
Suzanne Evans Wagner
Associate Professor of Linguistics
B-401 Wells Hall
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

Tel: +1 (517) 355-9739
http://www.msu.edu/~wagnersu
sociolinguistics.linglang.msu.edu

Office hours: http://swagner.youcanbook.me

Associate editor, Linguistics Vanguard
<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lingvan>
Co-editor, *Routledge Studies in Language Change
<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/RSLC/>*
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