FOS: Fw: Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium - Rebecca Roeder (11/29)

[Wagner, Suzanne]

FOS,

Don't miss this Thursday's talk by MSU Linguistics alum Rebecca Roeder!

Suzanne

________________________________
From: lin-colloq <lin-colloq-bounces at egr.msu.edu> on behalf of Nelson, Scott James <nelso672 at msu.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2018 7:18 PM
To: lin-colloq at lin.msu.edu
Subject: [lin-colloq] Michigan State University Linguistics Colloquium - Rebecca Roeder (11/29)


Good evening,

This is a reminder from the MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee that the final colloquium of the fall semester is this Thursday, November 29th at 4:30pm, in B342 Wells Hall. Our speaker is Rebecca Roeder (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), whose talk is titled “The role of PALM in the low back merger: Theory and evidence" (abstract below).

The colloquium series schedule can be found on our website<http://msulinguists.weebly.com/colloquium-and-events.html>. Please do not hesitate to contact us if there are any questions or concerns. We hope to see you on Thursday<http://airmail.calendar/2018-11-29%2012:00:00%20EST>!

Sincerely,


Scott Nelson and Yan Cong
MSU Linguistics Colloquium Committee Co-Chairs

nelso672 at msu.edu<mailto:nelso672 at msu.edu>, congyan at msu.edu<mailto:congyan at msu.edu>



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"The role of PALM in the low back merger: Theory and evidence”

Rebecca Roeder (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)


While the low back merger is attested as a widespread phenomenon across North American varieties of English (e.g., Labov et al. 2005), little previous work has examined it as a change in progress. Among the studies that have investigated the genesis of the merger (e.g., Bigham 2010, Durian 2012, Boberg 2017), focus has been on the LOT/THOUGHT merger, with little emphasis on PALM as a vowel implicated in the process, likely because PALM is now merged with LOT in most North American varieties of English, despite historically merging with BATH and START in Standard British English (Boberg 2010: 128). The current study addresses this research gap by examining the low back merger as a change in progress in the English of Victoria, British Columbia, where PALM is found to be realized as a separate vowel than LOT among some older speakers. Findings are based on automated measurements of wordlist data archived in the Synchronic Corpus of Victoria English (D’Arcy 2015) from 28 speakers, all born between 1913 and 1941. The acoustic positions of PALM/LOT/THOUGHT relative to TRAP are also considered.


Qualitative findings demonstrate that, for both men and women, some speakers display fully merged vowels and some display all three vowels as distinct, while yet others display merger of LOT/THOUGHT, but not PALM. TRAP (non pre-voiced-velar, non pre-nasal) is consistently in the lower front quadrant of the vowel space. Quantitative results indicate that, at the group-level, there are no statistically significant correlations between F1/F2 of TRAP and F1/F2 of LOT, THOUGHT, or PALM that suggest retracted TRAP is connected with a backer or higher pronunciation of the three target vowels. As such, these results do not concur with the profile observed in other areas that the retraction of TRAP begins prior to the low back merger and is correlated with the position of LOT or THOUGHT (e.g., Bigham 2010, Durian 2012), although implications of pre-merger backing of TRAP for phonological theory as related to acquisition are briefly explored. Instead, the findings for PALM in Victoria support the proposal that the low back merger is not the sole phonological trigger of the CS. More specifically, evidence fits the structural model formalized by Roeder & Gardner (2013) that the catalyst of the phonetic changes described in observations of the CS is a three-way merger of the PALM, LOT and THOUGHT lexical sets, in combination with a simultaneous change in the underlying feature specifications of the TRAP vowel. This model relies on the Modified Contrastive Specification Theory (Dresher et al. 1994), the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher 2009), and the Successive Division Algorithm (Dresher 2009). This research contributes to ongoing work on the mechanisms involved in the formation of the Third Dialect of English (Labov 1991), as well as to interdisciplinary work at the interface between sociophonetics and phonological theory.

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