Browsing by Subject "Perceptual dialectology"
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Item Perceptions of variation in second-generation Montrealers' speech : methods for remote ethnolinguistic research(2022-07-21) Adams, Tracey Gail; Bullock, Barbara E.; Villeneuve, Anne-José; Remysen, Wim; Blyth, Carl; Epps, PatienceThis dissertation assesses if and how ethnicity plays a role in speech perception amongst French speakers in Montreal, Quebec. Is ethnolinguistic variation present, and is it noticeable to Montrealers? In so doing, this work highlights the conflicting nature of two bodies of work: ethnographic and cultural studies research on immigrant communities in Montreal and sociolinguistic research on the region. The former underscores the importance of ethnic and cultural heritage in second-generation speakers’ self-presentation and speech, while the latter assumes that these same speakers have uniformly assimilated to a regional norm. For this dissertation, I aimed to collect and analyze data to better adjudicate between these hypotheses. As such, I created a new corpus, featuring women from the three largest ethnic / cultural communities in Montreal: Haitian, North African, and Quebecker, and experimented with techniques for running an exploratory perceptual experiment remotely. This study speaks to (i) methods of recruitment for remote sociolinguistic interviews, (ii) methods of conducting experiments online, (iii) techniques used in the free classification approach to perception tasks (Clopper & Pisoni, 2007), (iv) how second-generation Montrealers’ speech is perceived, and (v) why disciplines contradict each other with regard to these communities.Item Perceptual dialectology, mediatization, and idioms : exploring communities in Miami(2020-05-15) Callesano, Salvatore J.; Koike, Dale April; Toribio, Almeida J; Sessarego, Sandro; López, Belem; Lynch, AndrewMiami-Dade County differs from other major metropolitan areas in the U.S., mostly because of the immense Latinx national origin diversity and its characterization as the most dialectally diverse Spanish speaking city in the world (Carter & Lynch, 2015). Sociologists have been concerned with how Spanish and shared cultural practices act as a unifying force in the maintenance of pan-Latinidad in Miami (e.g. Mahler, 2018). Linguists, however, have only recently begun to address such questions (cf. Fernández Parera, 2017; Valencia & Lynch, 2019). As a point of departure, this dissertation first examines how Cubanness, stemming from Miami’s historically dominant Latinx group (Nijman, 2011, inter alia) and pan-Latinidad, emerging in the last 60 years, become constructed in digital communities. This dissertation investigates how, as a result of globalization and mediatization (Blommaert, 2010), Miami-based social media accounts on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok represent what it means to ‘speak Miami.’ Results show that idioms (e.g. comer mierda ‘to be bored’) are indexical of Cuban Miami. The data suggest that Miami’s mediascape (Appadurai, 1996) reinforces a sociolinguistic imaginary, following Anderson (1983), with regard to Miami Cuban Spanish. The focus of the dissertation then turns to how the resemiotized language (Leppänen, 2014) collected through translocal new media (Androutsopoulos, 2014) are conceptualized in terms of neighborhood association. Young adult participants in Miami (N = 98) completed a perceptual dialectology survey in Qualtrics, which resulted in heat maps. That data were analyzed using Chi-square to test for significance among the neighborhood associations during the heat mapping tasks. Aggregate results show that the idioms are strongly associated with Miami’s Cuban American neighborhoods, Little Havana and Hialeah. The results also show differences of ‘associative specificity,’ where for Cubans and heritage speakers of Spanish the idioms represent Cuban Miami specifically and, for non-Cubans and non-heritage speakers, the idioms are indexical of a broader concept of Miami. The dissertation demonstrates how online communities add to linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) through the process of mediatization and argues for the concept of ‘perceptual communities’ in discussions of globalized speech communities.