New England English : large-scale acoustic sociophonetics and dialectology
James N. Stanford (Author)
For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in the popular imagination. While other projects have studied various dialect regions of New England, this is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. In New England English, James N. Stanford presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recently collected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. Stanford and his team of Dartmouth students built this dataset over 8 years of face-to-face fieldwork and online audio recordings and0questionnaires. 0Using acoustic phonetics, computational processing, and dialect maps, the book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of geography, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors. This dataset is interpreted in terms of William Labov's outward orientation of the language faculty, dialect levelling, convergence and divergence, and "Hub social geometry." The result is a wide-ranging empirical analysis and theoretical overview of this influential English dialect region
xii, 351 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
9780190625658, 0190625651
1100425163
Preface
Part I: Setting the stage: 1. Introduction
2. The linguistic variables
3. Early founders and the founder effect
Part II: Bird's eye view: The Mechanical Turk Online Project: 4. Results from the Mechanical Turk Online audio recordings
5. Results from the Mechanical Turk Online written questionnaires
Part III: Exploring the hub: Fieldwork results from Eastern Massachusetts: 6. fieldwork results from Eastern Massachusetts
7. Focus on subgroups within the hub
Part IV: Exploring northern New England: Fieldwork results: 8. Fieldwork results from northeastern New England
9. Focus on subgroups of northern New England
Part V: Summary and discussion: 10. Summary of empirical results
11. Outward orientation, leveling, and hub social geometry
Appendix A: Primary field interview materials
Appendix B: Field interview materials for the New Hampshire/Vermont border study
Appendix C: The Mechanical Turk self-reporting questionnaire
Appendix D: The mechanical Turk audio survey
Appendix E: Information about the publicly available database: Dartmouth New england English Database (DNEED)
References