Browsing by Author "Erik R. Thomas, Committee Chair"

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Differential Vowel Accommodation among Two Native American Groups
(2006-05-08) Coggshall, Elizabeth Learn; Agnes Bolonyai, Committee Member; Erik R. Thomas, Committee Chair; Walt Wolfram, Committee Member
Despite recent attention to English varieties spoken by Native Americans in the Eastern United States, (Anderson 1999; Wolfram & Dannenberg 1999; Dannenberg 2002), they have generally been overlooked in terms of their construction of ethnolinguistic identity (Fought 2002). Many Native American contact situations in the Eastern US are different from those in the Western US because of the relative length of contact with and exposure to marked dialects of English. Is there evidence for a pan-lectal core of Native American English or a "Boarding School effect" in Eastern US, as posited for the Southwest by Leap (1993) and others? How have Native American speakers accommodated to their regional English dialects? Is there evidence for lingering source language transfer or substrate influence? Do these Native American English varieties maintain an ethnic identity separate from their regional identity? These questions are addressed through the comparative examination of the vowel systems of the Eastern Cherokee and Lumbee English, two prominent but quite distinct Native American groups in North Carolina. Their vowel systems are compared with each other and with their respective regional benchmark varieties—Appalachian English for the Eastern Cherokee and the Coastal Plain European American and African American English for the Lumbee in Robeson County. Based on acoustic analysis, their overall vowel systems are compared, with particular attention paid to the fronting of back vowels such as ⁄u⁄, the upgliding of ⁄⁄, and the realization of ⁄ai⁄. The Eastern Cherokee show more similarity to their European American Appalachian cohorts than do the Lumbee to their cohorts. The local Southern Highland dialect has played a primary formative role in the English of the Eastern Cherokee, especially in the production of ⁄u⁄ and ⁄⁄. At the same time, local dialect accommodation is complemented by some subtle substrate effects from the Cherokee language on the ⁄ai⁄ diphthongs (Anderson 1999). In part, this accommodation may be explained in terms of the long-term, highly local interaction between European Americans and Cherokees and the durablity of the Cherokee community in this region. A strong sense of regional place is also shared by the Eastern Cherokees with their European American cohorts. Though the Lumbee are regionally connected to other North Carolina dialect regions, they do not exhibit the degree of local dialect accommodation shown by the Cherokee. The differences include relic features such as backed ⁄ai⁄ nuclei, especially among the older speakers. Furthermore, no detectable substrate effect occurs in their vowels. This difference may be explained in terms of the Lumbee's early exposure and shift to English. Furthermore, they were historically exposed to a wider range of varieties of English than the Cherokee, and have been living in close contact with both European and African Americans since around 1730. In the process, their identity as American Indians has been questioned continually, leading to greater linguistic burden on marking themselves symbolically as the ethnolinguisitic "other"—that is, neither white nor black—in the tri-ethnic setting of Robeson County. References: Anderson, Bridget (1999). Source language transfer and vowel accommodation in the patterning of Cherokee English ⁄ai⁄ and ⁄oi⁄. American Speech 74, 4: 339-68. Dannenberg, Clare (2002). Sociolinguistic Constructs of Ethnic Identity: The Syntactic Delineation of an American Indian English. Durham, NC: Duke UP, for American Dialect Society. Fought, Carmen (2002). Ethnicity. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 444-72. Leap, William (1993). American Indian English. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press. Wolfram, Walt & Clare Dannenberg (1999). Dialect identity in a tri-ethnic context: The case of Lumbee American Indian English. English World-Wide 20:179-216.
An Intonational Analysis of Mexican American English in Comparison to Anglo American English
(2007-07-26) Ericson, Holly Anne; Erik R. Thomas, Committee Chair; Walt Wolfram, Committee Member; Carmine Prioli, Committee Member
Until recently, intonational aspects of Mexican American English have received little to no attention. The research that has been conducted (Fought 2003; Penfield and Ornstein-Galicia 1985; Metcalf 1972) is a good start, but needs more precision and rigor. There is a need to describe this prosodic feature in more accurate terms than line drawings accompanied by a narrow number scale (Metcalf 1972). In 1992 Beckman and Hirschberg proposed their solution to this gap with the ToBI Annotation Conventions, which is the current model used for measuring intonation. This thesis uses ToBI conventions in conjunction with Praat spectrograms to compare the intonation of Mexican American English to Anglo American English. Results indicate that speakers of these two groups do typically differ in intonational patterns, most noticeably in final contours and pitch accents. These intonational differences contribute to the distinctness of each variety, which can cause misunderstandings in communication (e.g.: MAE declarative mistaken for interrogative). The results of this study contribute to the understanding of Mexican American English and to the comparative examination of intonation based on natural conversation.