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Creak in the rain: Phonation in Oregon English

by JM Riebold

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Considering it desirable to include at least one paper in this annotated bibliography making reference to the specific phenomenon I hope to study, creaky voice as an emergent, gendered dialectal feature in the Pacific Northwest, I have chosen Riebold’s four-page extended abstract as an imperfect but preferable alternative to Ingle et al.’s (2005) conference paper discussed at http://www.aip.org/149th/ingle.html. According to the principles of new-dialect formation set out by Trudgill (2004), the young Pacific Northwest dialect region should become increasingly distinct and diverse in coming years.

Unlike many other North American dialects, Pacific Northwest English has seen relatively little research until the last decade, possibly, as Riebold notes, because of a perception of its “neutrality”. As part of the “third dialect” of English referred to by e.g. McElhinny (1999)—broadly speaking, Western North American English—it shares several features with the English of California and Western/Central Canada. Riebold sums up observed features of the dialect thus:


"Findings include participation in the Canadian/Californian shift (Conn 2002), centralization of front and back vowels (Conn 2002, Ingle et al. 2005, Riebold 2009, Ward 2003), raising of /æ, e:, ɛ/ before /g/ (Wassink, Squizzero, Scanlon, Schirra, Conn 2009), lexical differences (e.g. go to the coast, full on) (Conn 2006), and some Midland dialect features such as positive anymore (Conn personal communication, February 9, 2009). Another frequently reported finding is the use of creaky voice among Northwesterners (Conn, personal communication, February 9, 2009, Ingle et al. 2005, Ward 2003), particularly among women (2)."


Citing Podesva (2007) on creak as a way of widening a speaker’s F0 range, Riebold disprefers suppositions such as Laver’s (1994) that English creak can be a way of indicating “bored resignation”. Recording four male speakers in their twenties from Corvallis, a small town near Portland and the Pacific coast, he identified tokens impressionistically in extended spontaneous conversation, then measured them in Praat (he notes that this method dovetails well with the tendency for speakers to drop into creak and remain there for an extended period) (2). Many tokens were 5 or more syllables long, and they appeared most commonly utterance- and clause-finally (as predicted by numerous scholars, including e.g. Epstein 2002). 62.5 percent of clause-final tokens were creaked, suggesting that a purely prosodic explanation is not at play, or utterance-final tokens would have been creakier (they were 56 percent creaked).


Riebold discusses the possibility of extended turn-taking as a sociolinguistic motication for creak, following Ogden’s (2001) discussion of creak in Finnish. Under this model, “creaky voice would be a way for a speaker to maintain the floor despite the initiation of word-search, or a slower rate of speech, both of which might be seen as opportunities for another speaker to begin a turn of their own” (4). This strikes me, a native speaker of BC English, as impressionistically true and certainly worthy of investigation.


Riebold’s study covers similar ground to my own, and causes me to consider that a more manageable initial foray into experimental data collection for me might be a study on his model looking at women—these data could then be compared with his, and the difficulties in the perception portion of my study could be deferred for the time being. (I am concerned, however, that the comparison of BC and Oregon speakers would not be an appropriate basis for sound conclusions, and wonder whether collecting my own male and female data and deferring the perception study is a better plan. Certainly, I take heart from Riebold’s willingness to analyze natural speech on a large scale without undue concern for the many physiological, phonological, and prosodic issues brought up by other scholars looed t in this bibliography.) ( )
  MeditationesMartini | Apr 22, 2010 |
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