This week I’m in New Orleans at the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society. I will give three presentations, which you can download here.
Friday morning’s LSA talk on Meta-Linguistic Commentary
Download the slides here.
On Friday morning, I presented on a talk called “Towards a taxonomy of meta-linguistic commentary: The case of Utah English.” I’m venturing out into qualitative data analysis because the comments I hear about Utah English are juicy! The gist is that the vibes I get from Utahns about their own variety are different than the vibes I get from others about their varieties. So, is there a way to quantify this abstract part of language regard? I’m not there yet, but I show a few categories of comments that seem to be common in Utah. Perhaps I can soon start to quantify things and put a number on those different vibes.
Friday morning’s ADS poster on Utah English
Download the poster here!
At the ADS poster session, Scott Kiesling had a poster called “Measuring Pittsburgh Neighborhoods with the Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (APLS)”. Scott was involved in data collection in Pittsburgh in the early 2000s and recently, Dan Villarreal created APLS to make it easy to search and work with that data. We test whether a dozen or so phonological variables are conditioned by neighborhood. We do find some evidence and we can see how these variables co-occur. This is my first time venturing into this dialect area, so it’s pretty exciting to me to work with this new (to me) dataset!
Sunday morning’s ADS talk regional grammatical variation
Details forthcoming.