FOS: Fwd: [lin-colloq] MSU Linguistics Colloquium with Prof. Mary Kohn (Kansas State) this Thursday (3/22)

[Suzanne Evans Wagner]

FOS,

This week's colloquium speaker is socio-phonetician Dr Mary Kohn of Kansas
State. Details below!

Dr Kohn will also give a more informal talk to the Sociolinguistics Lab
earlier in the day, 12:30 - 1:30pm in B-411 Wells Hall. This will be on a
new project investigating Latinx speech in southwest Kansas. Please let me
know if you plan to come along, in case we need to find a bigger venue.

If you or a colleague or student would like to meet individually with Dr
Kohn, please contact the graduate student organizers, Kaylin Smith (
smit2297 at msu.edu) and Scott Nelson (nelso672 at msu.edu).

Best,
Suzanne


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Smith, Kaylin Marie <smit2297 at msu.edu>
Date: Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 10:13 AM
Subject: [lin-colloq] MSU Linguistics Colloquium with Prof. Mary Kohn
(Kansas State) this Thursday (3/22)
To: lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu <lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu>
Cc: Nelson, Scott James <nelso672 at msu.edu>


Good morning,

This is a reminder from the MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee that the
next colloquium will take place this Thursday, March 22nd at 4:30pm, in
B342 Wells Hall. Our speaker is Professor Mary Kohn (Kansas State University),
whose talk is titled "Supra-local change and social meaning: TRAP backing
in the Great Plains" (abstract below). We will have a coffee reception at
4PM in Wells B342 and will go to dinner at Altu's at 6:30PM.

The schedule for the rest of the colloquium series can be found on our
website here
<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__msulinguists.weebly.com_colloquium-2Dand-2Devents.html&d=DwMF-g&c=nE__W8dFE-shTxStwXtp0A&r=QmhZA4PVAobB5LX6f20h_A&m=nLYDHW_PAY5bi0t44SOCgFHWn7WlOV_R5_G4MMKtbLU&s=17GRay_wjJkvHx9aEmyVSiqnP1j1Rt-6RMZHB3pwvHA&e=>.
We
hope to see you there!

Sincerely,
Kaylin Smith and Scott Nelson
MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee Co-Chairs
smit2297 at msu.edu, nelso672 at msu.edu
_____________
*Supra-local change and social meaning: TRAP backing in the Great Plains*

Mary Kohn (Kansas State University)

Over the last fifty years many varieties of English have undergone a
dramatic change in which the front lax vowels undergo retraction. This
supra-regional shift, known as the California Vowel Shift (CVS) is found
throughout the American West (Fridland et al. 2016, 2017), the Midwest
(Durian 2012, Lusk 1974, Strelluf 2014) and even Lansing, MI (Wagner et al.
2016), to name just a few locations. While scholars have identified a
wide-spread distribution for this change, little is known about the origin
and timing of this spread. Further, little is known about how such
wide-spread changes gain indexical meanings. This talk will first review
evidence for the presence of the CVS in Kansas. Through an apparent time
analysis of over fifty speakers, I demonstrate that the CVS has been
present in Kansas for at least fifty years. I will then compare my findings
to previous studies of the CVS to argue that the shift emerged
simultaneously with similar patterns in the Southwest and West Coast.
Finally, I will present evidence from a perception study to examine social
meanings of the shift in Kansas.

Thirty five listeners participated in a combination of a dialect
recognition tasks (Williams et al. 1999) and matched-guise tasks
(Campbell-Kibler 2007).  Four critical stimuli belonged to one of two
matched guises, which were acoustically manipulated so that only trap F2
differed between matched guises (Villarreal 2016). Conservative guises
contained fronted (higher F2) trap and shifted guises contained backed
(lower F2) trap. In each trial, listeners identified speakers’ regional
origin and rated speakers on 14 affective Likert scales. Results suggest
that in Kansas trap backing is associated with California despite local
participation in the sound shift and perhaps reflecting the enregisterment
of this variable in national media. Instead of associating trap backing
with local identity, as Californians do, this sound change appears to index
both prestige and youth in Kansas, perhaps motivating the spread of this
sound change in the region. These results illuminate how local meanings
interact with and are influenced by more widespread discourses about
language and social meaning at the national level, thus providing
additional clues to how supra-regional variants are incorporated into local
varieties.


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