RBG: THOUGHT-raising and r-vocalization
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Katy Steinmetz, "How Ruth Bader Ginsburg found her voice", Time Magazine:
For three years, NYU linguistics professor emeritus John Victor Singler, along with researchers Nathan LaFave and Allison Shapp, pored over hours of audio of Ginsburg’s remarks at the Supreme Court. They used computer programs to analyze thousands of vowel and consonant utterances during her time arguing cases in the 1970s, and then from the early ’90s onward, after she returned to the court in robes. While one can hear flecks of classic New York features in Lawyer Ginsburg’s remarks—like the pursed, closed-mouthed vowels—her Brooklyn roots are more obvious in the speech of Justice Ginsburg, they found.
Their theory, reported here for the first time, is that “conscious or not,” the lawyer was doing something everyone does, what is known in linguistics as accommodation: adapting our ways of communicating depending on who we’re talking to. Accommodating can be done through word choice, pronunciation, even gestures. A common example would be when someone returns to the town where they grew up and their accent comes roaring back as they talk to friends and family who sound that way, too.
This is the first time that I can recall having seen embedded Soundcloud audio clips in a publication of this kind.
Steinmetz's Time article is very well done, in my opinion, but I'm not sure what to make of the claim that the theory is "reported here for the first time" — you can read more about this work in Allison Shapp, Nathan LaFave & John Victor Singler, "Ginsburg v. Ginsburg: A Longitudinal Study of Regional Features in a Supreme Court Justice’s Speech", University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 2014. Their abstract:
This study investigates the variable use of New York City (NYC) dialect features by Brooklyn-born Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, both from her time as a lawyer arguing cases before the Court in the 1970s and as a Justice hearing cases from the bench from 1993 onward. Our data comes from digitized recordings of Supreme Court cases available at The Oyez Project (www.oyez.org). The immensity of the Oyez Project’s corpus and its public availability provide us with tokens all along Ginsburg’s timeline at the Court. We look at THOUGHT vowels (N=556) and postvocalic /r/ (N=3304) with reference to their NYC variants, i.e., THOUGHT-raising and r-vocalization. While Ginsburg moved to Washington from NYC in 1980 and has remained there, her data at the endpoint of our study (2011–2012) shows a greater use of NYC vernacular features than was true of the data at the beginning (1972). Mixed-effects regression models using both linguistic and social predictors would seem to point to the importance of chronology for both features: for THOUGHT-raising, the best-fit model makes a binary temporal distinction, between the “Lawyer” years of the 1970’s and the “Justice” years from the 1993 to the 2011 terms. We refer to Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles, N. Coupland and J. Coupland 1991; Giles and Gasiorek 2013) to frame our explanation for what we see as Ginsburg’s reduced use of raised thought in the 1970’s. For r-vocalization, there is again a fundamentally binary distinction, with the year 2000 as the point of division. The forces that motivate this greater use of vocalized-r after 2000 are much less obvious than those behind the Lawyer v. Justice opposition that we propose for THOUGHT-raising. We weigh competing and somewhat contradictory explanations for Ginsburg’s increased use of r-vocalization.
[h/t Cynthia M.]
Matt Ferris said,
October 17, 2016 @ 8:33 am
What are THOUGHT vowels?
mollymooly said,
October 17, 2016 @ 12:15 pm
The THOUGHT vowel is the vowel in "thought", "Waugh", "hawk", "broad", etc.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 17, 2016 @ 12:27 pm
I just tried w/o success (i.e. looked for about 90 seconds and then gave up) to find a relevant clip on youtube, but the reference the piece gives (the way "Coffee Talk" is pronounced by the Canadian comedian Mike Myers' stereotypical middle-aged-Outer-Borough-Lady Linda Richman character) is a useful shorthand for Americans old enough to remember that character in illustrating the distinctively Brooklyn variant of the THOUGHT vowel (called the CLOTH vowel in the usual Wellsian nomenclature).
J.W. Brewer said,
October 17, 2016 @ 12:30 pm
By concidence, I just came across a piece by Myers (excerpt from a new memoir about growing up in Ontario) in which he gives a pretty-good-for-a-non-specialist account of Canadian English (including some regional variation) and contrasts the Toronto area vowels he grew up with with those of the Buffalo accent (influenced by the Northern Cities Shift) they heard on the American tv coming across the border. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/before-wayne-and-dr-evil-an-excerpt-from-mike-myerss-new-book-canada/article32363211/
J.W. Brewer said,
October 17, 2016 @ 12:37 pm
Oops, I misspoke. Since my CLOTH and THOUGHT vowels are thoroughly merged (as is true for most American dialects), I had actually forgotten that they were two separate sets in the Wellsian scheme rather than alternative names for the same set. But I don't think they're de-merged in old-timey Outer Borough NYC English? I.e., I should think the distinctive raising applies equally to CLOTH words and THOUGHT words.
Bob Ladd said,
October 17, 2016 @ 1:04 pm
@J W Brewer: The whole point about Wells's CLOTH set is precisely that in most varieties it doesn't have its own phoneme – it's the set of words that are consistently pronounced with the THOUGHT vowel in some varieties and the the LOT vowel in others. Of course, for GenAm speakers who have merged LOT and THOUGHT, there's no difference, but for American speakers without the LOT/THOUGHT merger (like myself), CLOTH words generally have the THOUGHT vowel while unmerged British speakers (e.g. Southern English) have the LOT vowel. So it's at best misleading to say that "CLOTH and THOUGHT vowels are merged"; CLOTH vowels are, in effect, always merged with either LOT or THOUGHT.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 17, 2016 @ 1:32 pm
I appreciate Prof. Ladd's insight. From my parochial perspective living inside my own variety of English, it would seem to make no difference whether I conceptualize the situation as pronouncing THOUGHT with my CLOTH vowel or vice versa, but I take the point that from a broader perspective the "vice versa" is a more useful and illuminating characterization of the merger my variety has.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
October 17, 2016 @ 3:59 pm
It's worth noting that traditional British Received Pronunciation had CLOTH=THOUGHT. It's part of the stereotype. Gawn orf. Cf. this classic Monty Python sketch.
Lazar said,
October 17, 2016 @ 5:31 pm
@JW: Oh, the lorst par of the British Empar. I'm curious what circumstances led the split to be near-universal among Americans (excepting those with the cot-caught merger), but present only in elite speech in Britain – not existing in any vernacular British dialect that I know of.
One note: the British form of the split was narrower than the (current) American one, which extends to voiced velars (dog, hog, long, song) and even the occasional voiceless one (chocolate).
Also, the n's make a fun diagnostic: U-RP and Northern AmEng have it in gone only; Midland and Southern AmEng (as well as AAVE) have it in both gone and on; and NYC has it in neither. When I heard Queen Elsa sing "dawn" and "gone" in "Let It Go" (the songwriter rhymed them, but she didn't), I knew her voice actress must be a New Yorker.
Rebecca said,
October 17, 2016 @ 9:21 pm
Re "reported here for the first time":
That did sound odd, but since Steinmetz mentions the work being presented and a forthcoming comprehensive article, my guess is she counts what she (or other journalists) do as "reporting", and what the original researchers do as presenting and/or publishing. I'm curious about whether she knew about the earlier working paper, or whether Shapp et al didn't want it linked, given the more developed paper on its way.