Research

While my dissertation is only in its nascent stages, it'll focus on the language and identity of rural oriented individuals in Northern Ontario, building off of my previous two qualifying papers. Here are some the questions I'm interested in exploring through this project:

• What is rural (Northern Ontario) style?

• What are some of the innovative features of rural identity? 

• What do rural oriented individuals have to say about their own language practices/identity? 

• How do rural oriented individuals express their identity through stance work? How does this differ according to gender identity? And, 

• How are rural oriented features used alongside rural oriented stances? 

Neo-hosers up north: Locally constructed meaning and FACE and GOAT ungliding in rural Ontario

In this case study, I explore the phenomenon of FACE and GOAT ungliding in two communities in Northern Ontario, Dowling and North Bay. Data come from sociolinguistic interviews recorded with speakers of all ages in the communities between 2010-2018

In Dowling, acoustic analysis revealed young, working-class men to have significant ungliding compared to other demographic groups. Comparative analysis North Bay, however, yielded no such social patterning of the feature. Crucially, however, a stronger predictor in both communities is country orientation. The most extreme ungliders are individuals with attitudes, occupations, and interests ideologically tied to notions of rurality.

Taking into consideration this evidence from the production and evidence from (implicit) perception of FACE and GOAT ungliding, my findings coalesce of the notion that the features indirectly index a meaning of rural orientation by virtue of their association with other qualities and conventions perceived to be related to this social category (e.g. being working-class and male). I argue this process of indexicalisation is motivated by rurally oriented individuals, the social group with the most extreme ungliding on average in both communities and mediated by characterological performances of these individuals in alt-media as a persona I identify as the neo-hoser.

Likes hockey, drives a truck, wears plaid, etc.: Ideological and indexical associations of GOAT ungliding in Ontario

Instantiations of ‘Country Talk’ have long served as a testament that sociocultural orientation to rural or urban identity is a valid determinant in driving linguistic variation (Labov 1963; Holmquist 1985; Podesva et al. 2015). In (Bigelow 2019), the conceptualization of rural orientation as a locally meaningful identity in Ontario, Canada was fleshed out of production and perception data. In a sample of speakers from Northern Ontario, rural oriented individuals – typically working-class, outdoorsy men – were found to have more unglided FACE and GOAT vowels. This finding was supported by evidence from television performances of rural, Ontarian characters who exhibited both unglided FACE and GOAT vowels and the same demographic traits as the rural individuals in the Northern Ontario data. This served as implicit perceptual evidence on the part of the actors/writers that rural orientation is a salient social identity within the province. From these findings, it was concluded that ungliding indexes such qualities as masculinity, toughness, and outdoorsiness, from which rural orientation is indirectly indexed by virtue of the perceived association between these qualities and this social category.

While (implicit) perceptual evidence (i.e., performance data) was consulted in this research, more explicit, perceptual evidence would make for a stronger argument as to the features’ social meaning. This study seeks to elicit such explicit perceptual evidence as to the social meaning of one of these features, GOAT ungliding. The data come from 45 participants from Northern and Southern Ontario who participated in a Matched-Guise Test (MGT) and judgement task. In the MGT, participants listened to audio clips both with and without GOAT ungliding and rated the speakers on various traits. They were then asked to give their thoughts on users of unglided GOAT and of users of glided GOAT. The quantitative MGT data were analyzed using distributional methods; the qualitative judgement task data were compared across the glided and unglided variants. 

Results from both the MGT and judgement task suggest associations with unglided GOAT and place (country and Northern Ontarian), gender presentation (masculinity), education (lower), and being working-class. The cultural descriptor of redneck was also a salient association. However, what the data also reflect is that these associations are not shared across both the regional participant groups. In line with findings in the literature (Ladefoged & Broadbent 1957; Campbell-Kibler 2007), this difference supports the idea that aspects of an individual’s own identity (such as where you live) may shape one’s interpretation of a linguistic form. The data further support Campbell-Kibler’s (2007) argument that the meaning of variants is not shared as part of a cohesive, variable phenomenon, but that each is a socially distinct entity with meanings independent from one another. For example, using a glided GOAT vowel does not make someone sound less redneck, despite the use of an unglided GOAT vowel making someone sound more redneck. Taken together, these findings reinforce the notion of the indexical field as a fluid system of ideological connections, and moreover, enrich our understanding of what it means to be rural in Ontario.

...

Where did all the articles go? The use of bare nominals in Marmora and Lake, Ontario 

(with Sali A. Tagliamonte, University of Toronto)

Fieldwork in Marmora, Ontario (pop. 4,074), a place with predominantly British founders, led to 39 sociolinguistic interviews with families having deep roots in the area. Among the most striking features observed are definite nouns with no articles.

(1)  We had Ø milking machine.             

Analysis shows they are frequent among the oldest community members, especially men and older people use them in more contexts than younger speakers. The data further show an effect of information structure (cf. Rupp and Tagliamonte, 2019). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that Marmora English reflects an earlier stage in the history of article development in English.

Why are wasteyutes a ting? 

(with Tim Gadanidis, Lisa Schlegl, Pocholo Umbal, and Derek Deni, all from the University of Toronto)

In this study, we examined lexical enregisterment through TH/DH-stopping in Multicultural Toronto English (MTE), a multiethnolect emergent in the Greater Toronto Area. Sociolinguistic interview data from young MTE speakers reveals an overall ~10% rate of stopping, with teenage males being the primary stoppers. However, despite the presence of stopping in the vernacular of most speakers, certain terms referring to character archetypes - e.g. wasteyutes, mandem - have become sites of enregisterment of TH/DH-stopping in MTE rather than enregisterment of stopping in more frequent words or of stopping itself. We argue that this is because these lexical items implement reflexive tropes, as speakers thought to be stoppers are those who might be labeled wasteyutes or mandem: young, male, suburban, typically non-white, and typically low status. As such, performance of these stereotypical personae fosters indexical linking between sound (TH/DH-stopping) and culturally salient identities (wasteyutes, mandem), cementing enregisterment of these terms in MTE.