FOS: Fw: Dissertation defense

[Wagner, Suzanne]

FOS,

Everyone is welcome to attend next week's dissertation defense by Xiaomei Wang, whose research on sound change and attitudes to domestic migrants in Tianjin, China was recently presented at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation 48 conference at the University of Oregon. Details are below.

Suzanne

________________________________
From: lin-grad <lin-grad-bounces at egr.msu.edu> on behalf of Schudlich, Tanner <schudlic at msu.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 2, 2019 2:34 PM
To: lin-grad at lin.msu.edu <lin-grad at lin.msu.edu>
Subject: [lin-grad] FW: Dissertation defense

**Begin forwarded message from Xiaomei Wang**

I will be defending my dissertation entitled Local Identity and Language Attitude in Standardization: Evidence from Tianjin Chinese Tone sandhi on December 12th at 12:30 pm in B-243 Wells Hall. An abstract of the dissertation is included below:

Local Identity and Language Attitude in Standardization: Evidence from Tianjin Chinese Tone Sandhi
Xiaomei Wang

​This dissertation studies how local identity and language attitudes affect dialect changes under the influences of standardization and migration by examining Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi in apparent time. Tianjin Chinese is in the process of standardization (Gao & Lu, 2003; Gu & Liu, 2003), but the current study finds that only stigmatized local features disappear, while an unmarked local feature seems to be immune to standardization. I interpret this in line with Labov’s (1972) study of Martha’s Vineyard, whereby traditional local features may come to index resistance to standardization and to the incursion of new people into the speech community.

Ninety sociolinguistic interviews, including a word list, were conducted in Tianjin in the local dialect in 2014-16 (48f, age18-82). Participants were categorized as ‘middle class’ or ‘working class’ using a combined measure of occupation, education and income. Qualitative assessments of ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ were assigned to speakers’ attitudes to Tianjin and to migrants. Like other major Chinese cities, Tianjin has experienced considerable in-migration from rural area ​since the late 20th century.​

The variables of the dissertation are three of the four traditional Tianjin tone sandhi,  referring to them as (FF), (FL) and (LL) after their input patterns of ‘falling falling’ (HL.HL), ‘falling low’ (HL.LL) and ‘low low’ (LL.LL) respectively. Application of the (FF) and (FL) rules produce local outputs; non-application makes a speaker sound more like a Standard Chinese (SC) speaker. The old output variant of (LL) is traditional; the new variant is closer to SC. Non-application of (LL) is rare.​

7462 tokens of (FF), 5683 tokens of (FL), and 4117 tokens of (LL) were extracted from the interviews and word lists (N = 17262).  Tokens were impressionistically coded for the application or non-application of (FF) and (FL), and for the new or old variant of (LL), and a subsample were checked in Praat.

(FF) application and the old variant of (LL) have decreased substantially in frequency over time, probably because their outputs include or are similar to the most salient Tianjin low tone: Tone 1 (Han 1993). Mixed effects regression shows that they are especially avoided in word list style, by the middle class, by women, and by people with a negative attitude to Tianjin dialect. In contrast, (FL) has increased from 73.5% among speakers aged 65+, to 93% among speakers under 65.  I speculate that because (FL) is below public awareness, with little style-shifting, it is available for ‘recycling’ (Dubois & Horvath 2000) as a positive marker of ‘new’ Tianjin identity. Tianjin natives may be linguistically contrasting themselves with the many migrants who have moved to the city in the last three decades, and indeed a negative attitude to migrants significantly increases the likelihood of (FL) application in the regress.

​The reduction or elimination of prominent stereotyped dialect features has been observed in languages with large numbers of speakers after modernization, often because of migration and the language contacts it caused (Hinskens, 1998). The unmarked dialect features have been observed to strengthen or revive to keep local identity (Labov,1972; Dubois & Horvath, 2000). These two conflicting forces might lead to a stable compromise dialect (Hinskens, 1998). Here the case study of Tianjin Chinese tone sandhi also exhibits signs of changing to a compromise dialect, with stereotyped local features disappearing and unmarked local features strengthening, adding to the expanding number of non-Western case studies of language change (Stanford & Preston, 2009) that support earlier generalizations made from Western communities.

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