3. between California and the Pacific Northwest: The Front Lax Vowels in San Francisco English

Abstract

The present analysis builds on previous evidence for the California Vowel Shift in San Francisco English (Hall-Lew 2009, 2013) with data on the lowering and retraction of BET (Kennedy & Grama 2012) and the BAT nasal split (Eckert 2008). Based on interview speech from a socially stratified sample of 22 San Franciscans, women lead men in the retraction changes, and European Americans lead Chinese Americans in both BAT retraction and BAN raising. We also find the first evidence for gender-differentiated change in BAN raising when the nasal is velar. Furthermore, preliminary data suggest a pre-velar effect for BET and BAT, which is best described as inhibition of retraction and lowering, not the raising movement of Pacific Northwest varieties (Becker et al. current volume, Wassink current volume). Overall, San Francisco English exhibits precisely the Northern Californian vowel system expected, rather than being an exceptional dialect island (cf. Labov et al. 2006). 1 The automatic align ment and extraction of vowel data is only possible due to long hours of initial orthographic transcription. Our thanks go to research funds from the 2009-2010 Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship which funded transcription by RAs Cla ire Drohan, Annabel Schwenk, and Amanda Wall, as well as to the 2010-2011 PPLS Pilot Scheme wh ich funded transcription by RAs Keelin Murray and the first author. A special note of thanks goes to RAs Julie Saigusa and Kieran Wilson, who, along with the authors of this paper, volunteered their time to pro ject transcription during 2014-2015. We also thank Josef Fruehwald and the editors and other contributors to this collection for the conversations that made this paper possible. Lastly, the biggest debt goes to those speakers whose voices are represented here. All shortcomings are our own.

Compression in the California Vowel Shift: Tracking generational sound change in California's Central Valley

“…Postcoronal goose and goat (which we call too and toe , respectively), have been found to show more advanced fronting than in other environments (e.g., Hall-Lew, 2009; Podesva et al, 2015). Note that we have chosen to restrict our focus to tokens that do not precede liquids (for GOOSE, GOAT, TOO, and TOE tokens) or nasals (for TRAP tokens), which are shown to behave differently than other phonological environments in various vowel classes of the CVS (e.g., Cardoso, Hall-Lew, Kementchedjhieva, & Purse, 2016).…”

1. Introduction

“…Though many scholars of California English use the term CVS in this broad way, this volume aims to distinguish the structurally related phenomenon of the short front vowel shift (here referred to as the Low-Back-Merger Shift) and the Low Back Merger from other contemporaneous and widespread sound changes, like Back Vowel Fronting and the bat nasal split, where bat before nasals is tense and bat elsewhere is lax (more below under "Related Sound Changes"). Regardless, in California scholarship it became clear that the LBMS was prevalent across coastal California, most advanced in urban areas, and exhibiting all the hallmark characteristics of an active sound change, with young people and women leading in apparent-time studies (Eckert 2008;Kennedy and Grama 2012;Hall-Lew et al 2015;Cardoso et al 2016). More recent research has documented the LBMS in inland, rural areas.…”

Embodying “tech”: Articulatory setting, phonetic variation, and social meaning

“… Post‐coronal GOOSE and GOAT show more advanced fronting than in other environments (Hall‐Lew, ) and back vowels preceding liquids (here POOL and BOWL) exhibit a backer production than other phonological environments (Cardoso, Hall‐Lew, Kementchedjhieva, & Purse, ). …”