Linguistics Colloquium Lecture Abstracts

Speech Analysis in Schizophrenia: Theory and Application

Ahmad Abu-Akel
Program in Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles

November 4, 1999

ABSTRACT

A series of studies is presented which demonstrate how speech analysis can help define and refine the characteristics associated with the psychopathology of schizophrenia. It will be argued that discourse analysis and linguistic analysis of schizophrenic speech can provide novel and useful information to further characterize the nature of the cognitive impairments found in schizophrenia, to diagnose the condition, and to evaluate medication efficacy. More generally, it will be also be shown how discourse and linguistic analyses of schizophrenic speech can inform theories pertaining to language acquisition and use. The advantage of discourse and linguistic analyses of schizophrenic speech over existing clinical measures will be also be emphasized.

The End of Culture? Culture, Writing, and ESL in the 21st Century

Dwight Atkinson

Nov. 18, 2002

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I will describe my own efforts to follow the variegated career of the "culture" concept as it relates especially to thinking about and teaching English as a second language and writing.

Current positions on the question of culture range from getting rid of the notion altogether, to giving culture much the same range and power that it has had in the past, to serious critique and revision, to defining culture in quite particular ways that are at variance with received "culturalist" traditions (e.g., cultural studies). I begin by briefly reviewing the history of the modern concept of culture, then proceed to sketch out each of these positions as I understand them.

Having sketched out the different possibilities, I proceed to discuss how they have impacted, and will continue to impact, the applied fields of composition studies and English as a Second Language. Comparing the career of culture in these two fields is instructive and cautionary: ESL has largely adopted a received notion of culture, and only in recent years has the concept begun to come under challenge. Composition studies, on the other hand, has been much more willing to take on postmodernist and critical notions of culture, often to the exclusion of other possibilities.

In conclusion, I argue for a concept of culture which tries to combine elements of the different traditions that I have reviewed.

Biostatement

Dwight Atkinson teaches in the Graduate School of Education at Temple University Japan. He has done research on a variety of topics involving writing and culture: the history of medical and scientific research writing in English; so-called critical thinking; voice and individualism in writing instruction; theories of culture in TESOL; and qualitative research methods. He is currently at work on a five-year study of the gate-keeping role of the English language in higher education in India.

Examining English Language Policy in the European Union

Margie Berns, Purdue University

October 17, 2001 at 4:30 pm in 208 McConnell Hall

ABSTRACT

Among the many economic, social, and political issues that European Union (EU) officials and policy makers must grapple with is the status of the various languages of the member states. Not only do language policies affect the Union as a whole in terms of protecting Europe's multilingualism and multiculturalism. In Brussels, too, decisions have to be made on a daily basis determining which language or languages to use in face-to-face and written communication in the course of conducting EU business.

The English language plays a special role in this context because of it status as a language of wider communication throughout Europe. Although it is not the only official or working language of the EU, its dominance advantages as well as disadvantages representatives of the member states and impacts the power dynamics of meetings and working sessions. Such differences are illustrated in EU officials' varying degrees of English proficiency and/or willingness to use English as well as their reactions to the choice and availability (through interpreters) of languages in their interactions with their counterparts.

Using examples from an interview with a legal advisor to the European Commission, I highlight the practical challenges of balancing communicative expediency and linguistic equality on a daily basis. These behind the scenes glimpses of policy making, I believe, can inform a broader understanding of the relationship of language and power at the micro as well as macro level. From these insights, implications of social and political insignificance can be drawn for the future status and use of English in Europe both within and beyond meeting rooms in Brussels.

"School English" in African-American Children and its Relation to Early Reading Achievement

Anne H. Charity

Nov. 4, 2004

To learn to read, a child must discover how oral language corresponds to the written word. Learning to read may thus be harder for children whose speech does not closely resemble the language encountered in most written materials and many classrooms. One dialect of spoken English that is markedly different from "School English" in some important respects is African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). We hypothesized that for children whose everyday dialect is AAVE, higher familiarity with School English would be related to greater success in early reading.

To investigate this question, we studied 217 urban African-American students from kindergarten through second grade classrooms in three cities. We used a sentence imitation task to measure familiarity with School English. An examiner (a teacher) spoke each sentence of a story, and the child was asked to repeat it exactly as presented. The 15 sentences included phonological and grammatical forms that are often produced differently in AAVE than in School English. We defined high familiarity with the school dialect as the reproduction of the School English form, rather than use of the corresponding AAVE form, for a high proportion of the imitated items.

There was wide variation among students in their sentence imitation scores, indicating that some children were much more familiar than others with features of School English. This occurred in all grades, although the average scores of kindergartners were slightly lower than those of older students. As hypothesized, differences in familiarity with the school dialect correlated well with children's scores on reading tests. For the most part, reading achievement was related to children's knowledge of both phonological (speech sounds) and grammatical (phrases and word endings) features of School English. These robust relationships held up even when memory skills and socioeconomic status were taken into account.

Our findings are consistent with the longstanding view that dialect differences may contribute to the reading difficulties of this population of students. In our view, three explanations of the results merit consideration. First, the degree of mismatch between oral and written language is almost certainly higher for children who are less familiar with School English. For these students, the correspondences between spellings and sounds of words would probably appear to be less regular and hence more difficult to learn. Second, high familiarity with the school dialect may be an indication that a child is more tuned in to the complexities of language, including dialect differences and other aspects of speech. This would be consistent with past research showing that children with strong linguistic awareness are usually most successful at learning to read. Third, some teachers may, perhaps unwittingly, have more favorable views and expectations about children who exhibit greater knowledge of the school dialect, and thus may instruct them differently than their classmates. Future research will be needed to examine these hypotheses further.

This research was conducted in collaboration with Hollis S. Scarborough, Haskins Laboratories, and Darion M. Griffin, American Federation of Teachers.

About the speaker (return to top of abstract) Anne H. Charity is the Thurgood Marshall dissertation-fellow-in residence at Dartmouth College. She is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. A Ford Foundation fellowship will enable her to remain in residence at Dartmouth for another year. At UPenn, she was a site supervisor for the America Reads program, which was spearheaded by her dissertation advisor, William Labov. She is currently working with Hollis Scarborough (Haskins Laboratories) on a project that is examining the empirical relationship between language variation and reading ability in African-American children. This research is sponsored by a joint venture between the Haskins Laboratories and the American Federation of Teachers. The results of her work on both projects will appear in both academic journals and in forms that are most useful to teachers. These award-winning combinations of theory and practice inspired her to write her dissertation on the range of dialect used in schools by low socioeconomic African-American children. Anne grew up in a rural area outside of Richmond Virginia, so being in rural New Hampshire feels much like being at home, just cooler!

Travelers, Explorers, and Scholars: The Representation of Space and Place in Mesoamerica

Roxanne Dávila, Brandeis University

ABSTRACT

In this project I explore the representation of three pre-Columbian Maya sites - Copán, Palenque, and Chichen Itzá- both real and imaginary space in travel narratives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern archaeological discourses, and in texts produced by the contemporary Maya in each area. I am interested specifically in the mechanisms by which both colonial and post-colonial national, cultural and ethnic identities have been linked to pre-Columbian sites and how they have been represented in narrative discourse. My project responds to the following questions: How have explorers, travelers, investigators, political envoys and modern scholars, traditionally seen as "outsiders," textually represented Maya space and place in their writings over the centuries? And, how do these representations approximate or differ from the images of the sites that the contemporary Maya have appropriated for their own political and cultural texts? This project provides insight into the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that have been played out visually and textually across disciplinary boundaries in Mesoamerica in recent years.

Demystifying African-American English

Anita Henderson, University of Pennsylvania

Nov. 1, 2001 at 4:00 p.m. in Hamilton Smith 126

ABSTRACT

Attitudes about African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) are fundamentally about race and not language. These negative perspectives lead to dangerous misconceptions about the intelligence of African-Americans. However, linguistic evidence demonstrates that features of AAVE are shared by other languages of the world, earlier versions of English, and even by Standard English (SE) itself. The English language as spoken by African-Americans is not a homogeneous variety. The varieties of English spoken by Blacks form a continuum between SE and AAVE in which speakers incorporate a number of different features of AAVE in their language, in the grammar (e.g., I be studying on Saturday), phonology (e.g., nasalization of vowels before syllable-final nasal consonants in words such as man), and lexicon (i.e., /æks/ for ask). AAVE shares many of its features with SE, however, it does have unique features. Several of these structures will be examined in the context of other languages and varieties of English. There is great explanatory value in presenting features of AAVE through similar constructions in other languages: the logical structure of AAVE is irrefutable. This approach to AAVE helps to reveal the ways in which cultural biases influence attitudes toward language.

What sequential positioning tells us about utterance deployment in naturally occurring talk-in-interaction: The case of "saying what wasn't said" in physics conference talk rehearsals

Dr. Sally Jacoby, Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire

Monday, February 8, 1999, at 4:30 p.m.

ABSTRACT

In my study of physicists rehearsing for upcoming conference presentations, a particular class of negative observation utterances occurs with some regularity (n=40) in the discourse of the senior scientist when he gives comments and feedback on presentation runthroughs. Deployment of this class of utterances, variations of which include "You never define alpha," "There's a very important point here that you left out," "You never stated that the field was cooled," and "But you didn't say that," I have named 'saying what wasn't said.'

I argue in this presentation that what these utterances achieve in real-time interaction can only be fully appreciated if we go beyond the analysis of their lexical and syntactic features to include an analysis of their deployment at particular places in particular kinds of unfolding conversational sequences. It will be shown that in addition to calling attention to a perceived relevant absence which ought to be included in a future version of the conference presentation, particular sequential deployments of 'saying what wasn't said' can, inter alia, launch a topically new comment sequence or swiftly differentiate a presenter's claims of competence in physics from the assessment of the presenter's competence in performing scientific argument for an audience.

Implications will be drawn for the study of culturally situated "language use" with specific reference to the interactional practices through which members are socialized into alleged discourse norms and professional expectations.

What neuroimaging has revealed about bilingualism

Gary Jasdzewski, Harvard Medical School

Oct. 8, 2002, 10:00-11:00 a.m., Hamilton Smith 19

ABSTRACT

The bilingual brain has been the object of scientific study since the 19th century. A majority of the research on bilingual brains has involved the study of aphasia, and it wasn’t until the relatively recent development of neuroimaging techniques like fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and ERP’s (Event Related Potentials) that healthy undamaged brains could be studied. In this talk, I’ll discuss the emerging cognitive neuroscience of bilingualism, explaining how these neuroimaging techniques work and what they have revealed about the bilingual brain, focusing on a recently finished fMRI study of semantic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals by our lab.

Language Emergence in a Language-Ready Brain

Judy Kegl, University of Southern Maine

Thursday, Nov. 30, 2000, at 4 pm in Ham Smith 101

ABSTRACT

Two decades ago in Nicaragua we were privileged to witness the emergence of a signed language in a context in which there was no access to the co-occurring spoken language because auditory access was precluded and where there was no prior signed language to serve as input to the first language acquisition process. I will show that humans can and do remain language-less if sufficient conditions for the triggering of the first language acquisition process are not met. However, I will also argue that the language that emerged was a product of the human brain and restructured available raw materials in the environment (gesture) to conform to the human expectation of how language is organized. I argue that neither spoken nor signed languages can be argued to be an outgrowth of the evolution or expanded use of gesture.

A Pragmatic Analysis of the adequacy of a Warning: Were the rights of the accused violated when her phone calls were recorded from a holding cell?

Keller Magenau, UNH

ABSTRACT

What do you do with pragmatics? In this talk I provide one example of how pragmatic analysis of a text can inform legal practice. In a drug-trafficking case in Maricopa County, Arizona in 2002 a major source of evidence against the defendant was the recorded phone calls she made from a holding cell awaiting arraignment. Was the defendant adequately warned that the calls were being recorded and would be used against her in a court of law? A pragmatic analysis of the pre-recorded announcement heard by all defendants when they placed outgoing calls suggests that the discourse does not constitute an adequate warning. This factor played a significant role in the Jury's deliberation which ultimately resulted in a mistrial.

Beliefs about learning and teaching English in Japan

Hiroko Matsuura, Fukushima University

September 17, 2001

ABSTRACT

The Commission on Japan's Goals in the 21st Century, a consultative body established by the late Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, submitted a lengthy report to the Prime Minister on January 18, 2000. It included numerous ideas with respect to policies that Japan should implement with the advent of the new century. One of the proposals called for the establishment of English as the country’s second official language. This proposal shocked many language educators and students as well as ordinary citizens. As the commission expected, the proposal to make English a second official language became a controversial issue, generating serious debate among many Japanese. However, with Obuchi's death, the furor has gradually diminished, and therefore, to this date, there has been no consensus on the future status of English.

In the lecture, I will report the results of a survey conducted to explore university students' and teachers' beliefs about not only the future status of English and goals for studying English but also the proficiency level of ordinary Japanese and appropriate instructional styles for Japanese learners. I believe that data collected from over 500 participants will help delineate their epistemological beliefs about the English language and expectations for English education in Japan.

World Englishes, Native Americans, and Language Policy: English Only in the Fourth World

Tracy McHenry, Eastern Washington University

September 18, 2002, UNH Linguistics Colloquium

ABSTRACT

The term “fourth world” was first used in Canadian Native leader Chief George Manuel’s 1974 book The Fourth World: An Indian Reality as a demographic category for indigenous people of unrecognized nations living within recognized (post)colonial nation-states. Today, researchers of Native American languages still face the challenge of understanding how the history of imperialism has affected and continues to affect the linguistic health of these endangered languages. Whereas the challenges facing indigenous languages come from a variety of sources, one often underestimated source is the English Only lobbying group U. S. English. When federal English Only legislation failed to gain support in the 1990s, U. S. English changed its plan of attack to focus on state-level legislation, mostly in the Western U.S. In 1998, citizens of Alaska passed an English Only law to prohibit the use of languages other than English in all official state communications. The linguistic landscape in Alaska can be seen as a microcosm of the events taking place on state levels across the United States and, as such, can serve as an example of the dynamics of linguistic imperialism. The presentation begins by establishing Alaskan Natives in Kachru’s Concentric Circles. Next, a brief history of U.S. English and the organization’s connection to the 1998 ballot measure in Alaska are discussed, followed by an overview of the public reaction to the measure, representing both Native and non-Native perspectives on this issue. Finally, Alaska’s experience with official language policy in a linguistically complex nation is situated in the wider context of World Englishes scholarship.

Variation in the grammar (book)of Faetar

Naomi Nagy, University of New Hampshire

ABSTRACT

This talk reports on the process of writing a descriptive grammar of Faetar, a non-standard, non-codified, highly variable language which is the outcome of contact between speakers of a dialect of Francoprovençal and speakers of southern (Apulian) Italian varieties.

I have been conducting research on Faetar, a Francoprovençal dialect indigenous to the village of Faeto in southern Italy since 1992. Speakers have been predicting Faetar's demise for decades and lamenting the "imperfect form" of their present vernacular, rather than recognizing the inevitable result of language change. Such attitudes and the rate of decline may be affected by language codification (Goebl et al. 1996), providing impetus for constructing a grammar that shows the ways the language is actually spoken.

However, when a sociolinguist is confronted with the task of writing a grammar of a language, the traditional methods of homogeneous grammar preparation clash with the sociolinguistic goals of representing socially-correlated variation in the Grammar. I discuss my attempts at resolving this conflict.

The grammar of Faetar I have just completed illustrates the actual use of the language, which (like all languages) is variable, ever-changing, and indexed to the speaker's identity. Specific features of the grammar to be discussed include:

Representing data collected from many speakers
Selecting representative forms from naturally occurring speech
Organizational procedures for showing multiple variants
Attribution of variants to particular groups in the community

Grammatical features of New England folk speech: Evidence from colonial and postcolonial writings

Adrian Pablé, Université de Berne, Switzerland and Radoslaw Dylewski, Poznan University, Poland

Monday, April 11, 2005, at 4:00 pm.

ABSTRACT

The present paper aims at shedding some light on the selected grammatical features of New England folk speech from a historical perspective. It simultaneously constitutes an attempt to fill the void left by the dearth of scholarly attention devoted to characterstic features of the Downeast New England dialect, however already present in the early colonial days. What is more, the study aims at a better comprehension of one of the most common features of vernacular dialects worldwide (Chambers 1995), namely the phenomenon of invariant `be' (which seems not yet fully understood) and gives a diachronic account of the variation between the singular and plural past-tense forms of be, which have been given conspicuous attention by dialectologists working on nonstandard varieties of the Mid-Atlantic States (e.g. Schilling-Estes & Wolfram 1994).

The paper is based on an analysis of the linguistic material gathered both in the Salem Witchcraft Papers and nineteenth and early twentieth century documents. The choice of the sources for scrutiny is by no means accidental. Firstly, the Puritan society left behind a substantial amount of documentary material of various sorts (fairly often reflecting the language of unlettered people), which can offer an adequate picture of the speech of the first Americans (cf. Rissanen 1984). In particular, verbatim trial records as well as witnesses depositions are exceedingly valuable and offer important material for the attempt to draw conclusions concerning the spoken expression of the descendants of seventeenth century American immigrants.

Secondly, the present study also draws on fictional material and therefore looks at data embedded in connected discourse. The authors suggest that works of fiction, if chosen with care, may provide valuable insight into nonstandard features for which there is but scant evidence in other primary materials.

Working with ELL/SPED students: Identification, Assessment, and Modification

Lynne Pallarino

April 18, 2005 at 5 pm. Hamilton Smith 18

ABSTRACT

Identifying and providing services for the ELL (English Language Learners)/SPED (Special Education) student is a challenging procedure in most school districts. Based on first-hand experience from an elementary K-5 ESOL teacher, learn what is involved in identifying, assessing, and modifying the curriculum for an LEP (Limited English Proficiency) student who needs special education services. It is new territory for many educators and most importantly, a collaborative process, involving the ESOL and SPED professionals, the administration and the parents.

Understanding Second Language Variability

by Katherine Rehner

3:30 to 5:00 on Tuesday, Nov. 9, 1999, in Hamilton Smith 127.

ABSTRACT

In our mother tongue, we often take for granted the ability to modify the way we speak. We readily vary the words we use, the structures of our sentences, and the sounds of our speech to reflect the situations in which we find ourselves, the people with whom we are speaking, the impressions of ourselves we wish to create, and the nature of our relationships.
What happens to this linguistic variability when we are no longer speaking our mother tongue but our second language, especially if we are only exposed to this language within the classroom? Do we develop the ability to vary our second language to reflect changes in situations, speakers, relationships, and personae to which are not exposed within the confines of the language classroom? If we do not have the opportunity to hear how our second language changes in a variety of contexts, what tactics do we employ when we are forced to use this language in unfamiliar situations? Do we mimic the changes characteristic of our mother tongue, even if we are not sure that such changes suit our second language? Do we make educated guesses as to how a native speaker of our second language would proceed? Or do we stick to what we know regardless of its contextual inappropriateness?

My research explores how Torontonian speakers of English vary their French as a second language within the context of a semi-formal interview and compares this variability with that found for native speakers of French. My work addresses some of the questions posed above and helps to redefine how linguistic variability is understood within studies of second language.

Do bilingualism and exposure to French influence American English pronunciation: A Study of the Franco-American population of Manchester, New Hampshire

Wendy Ryback-Soucy

The University of New Hampshire

UROP SURF 1997 Project Proposal

Definition of the project

In the United States, there is no one single standard American English; there are many distinct variations. The geographical area that one grows up in, family traditions, the various languages one is exposed to on a continuous basis, and how mobile one is, can all affect one's spoken language. Paralleling the renewed interest in Ebonics as an English dialect influenced by African languages, I wonder if a Franco-American's language has its own distinctions? Does the French language influence their American English?

Throughout the country there are examples of language influence such as in colonial times, when residents of the seacoast towns of New England were influenced by the British in their American English (Carver 1992). The dialects in the area of the upper Great Lakes, Michigan and Minnesota were influenced by their Norwegian immigrants (Haugen 1969). The dialects of the Southwest have been affected by their Native American heritage (Leap 1982). Language is ever changing and constantly being influenced by numerous factors. I am expecting to find that the speakers who have a greater incidence of the French variants in their English language are culturally more French-oriented and/or linguistically more French dominant. This prediction parallels the findings cited in Nagy et al.'s paper, "On the acquisition of variable phonology in L2."

The 1976 Survey of Income and Education found that 1.9 million Americans reported French language background, making French the fourth largest language minority group in the U.S. (Grosjean 1982). Using the French language every day is an important link to the Franco-American's heritage. Forty percent of Franco-Americans are fortunate to be bilingual; losing their second language would be like losing part of themselves.

The use and or exposure to French on a daily basis may influence their production of American English. Correlations between linguistic attitude, social background, and choice of a particular pronunciation variant of a sound have been demonstrated repeatedly (cf. Labov 1972, Nagy et al.1995).

The questions that I explore are, does the Franco-American community of greater Manchester speak a distinct variety of American English? Do they have their own dialect in English? Can its peculiarities be traced to influence from French? And, if so, do speakers with stronger cultural ties to French exhibit this resemblance by producing a more French-sounding English?

Significance and Implications

I am preparing to become a Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP) by majoring in Communication Disorders. A SLP's initial step in evaluating an individual's speech is assessing their abilities through standardized testing. When learning English that is influenced by another language "many students are at risk for educational failure due to their language and not because of a language impairment" (Long 1994:290):

An essential step toward making accurate assessments of communicative disorders is to distinguish between those aspects of linguistic variation that represent the diversity of the English language from those that represent speech, language and hearing disorders. The speech-language pathologist must have certain competencies to distinguish between dialectal differences and communicative disorders. These competencies include knowledge of the particular dialect as a rule-governed linguistic system, knowledge of the phonological and grammatical features of the dialect and knowledge of nondiscriminatory testing procedures (ASHA Committee on the Status of Racial Minorities, 1983: 23), cited in (Long 1994:308).

After receiving my graduate degree, I would like to work in the Manchester area and this research will prove to be a valuable tool in my career, providing knowledge of linguistic variation within the community. This knowledge may benefit other SLPs as well. Wider implications of my research include the description of a new speech community, the recording of a dying (?) dialect of this region, and a new case study for the "Languages in Contact" theory. It will be interesting to compare this study with that of Sankoff, et al.'s research on Anglophones learning French in Quebec, which is exactly the opposite situation.

History of the Franco-American community

Between the years 1870-1930, the emigration of the French Canadians to the New England area was due to the explosion of the textile industry. In Manchester, New Hampshire, by 1900, 40% of the local population was Franco-American (Brault 1986). This estimate is very close to present day counts according to approximations made by the Franco-American Center of Manchester, NH. Due to the density and closeness of the Franco-American community of Manchester, many French traditions are carried on today, including attending Franco-American churches, reciting prayers in French, using French in the home environment, membership in the Association Canado-Americaine and American-Canadian Genealogical Society, as well as attending conferences, meetings and social events put on by these two groups. It would be surprising if this ethnic pride did not appear at all in their speech.

Methodology

For this project, both social and linguistic information about the members of the Franco-American community is necessary. My approach to collecting the data will be to interview Franco-Americans of Manchester and have them reminisce about their experiences growing up as a Franco-American. The questions that I will ask include:

What was their outlook on life and was it influenced by the customs and traditions of their French-Canadian heritage? How was their family actively involved in Franco-American activities? Was French spoken all the time or was it regarded as a "secret language", used only when the speakers did not want the children to know what was being said? How do they feel having a different language in their background?

I will conduct and tape record 16 interviews that will each be roughly 45 minutes in length. To secure a balanced sample, participants will be selected to form equal numbers of male, female, young, old, bilingual (French and English) and monolingual (English). All of the interviews will be transcribed by me. I will then find approximately 100 examples of each variable for every speaker, count the numbers of each variant (possible ways to pronounce each variable), transcribe those variants using the phonetic alphabet and compare my findings across the data set.

The variables that I will investigate were chosen after reading current research articles and books about the French-Canadian language, the effects of languages in contact, variable phonology, and bilingual effects on language (Brault 1986, Janda & Auger 1992, Nagy et al. 1995, Sankoff et al. in press, Thibault, 1979). Following is a list of 5 variables that I will investigate, but given the time allotted for this research (9 weeks), I will analyze the 3 most prominent variables once my data set is complete. Each linguistic variable is presented below with its different variants and examples of each.

1. "th" pronounced as in English, or as a "t" or "d" because "th" is not a sound that is native to the French language. "Them" may be pronounced as "tem" or "dem".

2. The affrication of the consonants /t/ and /d/ before high front vowels such as [i], as in Mardi (Tuesday) as this is a Quebecois French dialect feature (Nagy 1995). An example of affrication in Montreal French is [mardzi] for standard French [mardi]. I will investigate the influence of the French pattern into English words like tea, or dear. That is, are they pronounced [tsiy] and [dziyr] which would indicate a French influence and suggesting a pro-French attitude or [tiy] and [diyr] without French influence.

3. Hypercorrection and incorrection in the production of word-initial "h," for example in such words as [h]eggs, head[h]ache (hypercorrection) and 'air, 'ands, 'eadache (incorrection). The French language lacks /h/ in any environment (Janda & Auger 1992), so it is expected that these speakers may not have mastered the rules for its production.

4. Lengthening of the "short e" as in the English word "then". According to Brault, this vowel may be produced in several different ways in French (Brault 1986:49). Does this variation exist in Franco-English providing forms such as "thain" or "then"?

5. The "r" sound might be produced in four different ways in the English of this region. It may be heard as an alveolar trill (rolling of the "r") which is representative of old Montreal French and the uvular fricative of newer Montreal French, a more guttural sounding "r", both representing French influence; or as an uvular liquid (standard American English), deletion of the "r" sound that is characteristic of the Boston area ("park" pronounced as "pahk"), indicating no French influence.

Background and Preparation

I have always had an interest in dialects of English. I enjoy listening to friends and co-workers from various countries, such as Belgium and the Czech Republic, and hearing their versions of English. An interest in French-Canadian ancestral links has blossomed from my own personal background (maternal side of French-Canadian descent) and also that of my husband's, whose family has lived in the city of Manchester for decades.
In order to prepare myself for this dialectal research, I have taken Introduction to Linguistics (Fall '96) and Linguistic Field Methods (Spring '97). In these courses, I have studied phonetics, phonology (the study of how sounds interact in different languages), dialect variation, analysis techniques and transcription methods.

Outcome

The final results of my research will be documented in a written paper. This will include (a) synthesis of linguistic attitudes and history of the interviewees, (b) sociolinguistic analysis of dialectal variants, and (c) an account of the correlation between (a) and (b). I will present my final analysis in Naomi Nagy's sociolinguistics seminar in the Fall of 1997. In addition, I may submit a co-authored paper to New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAVE), the annual sociolinguistics conference to be held in Quebec City in the fall of 1997. A copy of my final analysis will be given to Naomi Nagy to provide data for future use in her area of research. A version of this paper will also be presented to the Franco-American Center of Manchester, NH.

Location

The interviews will take place in Manchester. Off campus resources that I will use will include the Franco-American Center Library located in Manchester. I will need to travel to Durham for the last portion of my research as I will need to use specialized equipment for phonetic analysis.

My Role/Faculty Advisor's Role

I will be the sole interviewer, transcriber and researcher on this project. Most of my research will take place within the Franco-American community. Transcription and analysis of the data set will take place in my home in Manchester and at UNH in Durham. My faculty sponsor will help in answering questions on interviewing techniques and strategies that will surface during the interviewing process, she will help me in designing questions for eliciting oral histories, provide equipment needed for phonetic analysis, help with any difficulties encountered in the transcribing process and provide moral support for this first time researcher.

Timetable

June 1 thru 21 --- Interview Franco-American residents of Manchester, NH
June 22 thru July 5 --- Transcribing the recordings
July 6 thru 26 --- Analysis of the data set
July 27 thru August 2 --- Writing of the final paper

References