Robinson 2010 Disintegration

Robinson, Eugene. 2010. Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. New York: Doubleday.

In his 2010 book, Robinson, a staff writer for The Washington Post examines how although "black America" is still discussed as though it is a unified group, it actually comprises four distinct segments of society, each of which has different agendas than the others. He labels these four groups the transcendents, or the people like President Obama and Oprah, who represent wealth and power of the highest order, the mainstream, or the increasingly college-educated middle-and-upper-middle class whose focus is no longer on bootstrapping out of poverty but on maintaining a quality of life once ascribed to whites, the abandoned, the lower-income increasingly single-parented, high-school or lower-educated community, and the emergent, the immigrants from Africa who often still have claim identities of their home countries, but whose children increasingly are known simply as African American rather than Nigerian American or Ethiopian American, etc.

This book is particularly useful to my work as it discusses many socioeconomic and racial shifts within various segments of D.C., with a particular focus on the race riots of 1968. Much of Robinson's argument is that during Jim Crow segregation, there was racial segregation and socioeconomic integration in Washington D.C. communities, with areas like U Street being meccas for black citizens of all socioeconomic levels. In the wake of the destruction of the race riots, new settling patterns in D.C. have moved far more along economic lines than racial ones, so that mainstream and transcendent black populations live alongside comparably economically situated whites. This could have profound impact on language practice, especially in the gentrifying neighborhoods which I wish to study

DuBois and Horvath 1998

DuBois, Silvie and Barbara Horvath. 1998. Let's tink about dat:

Interdental fricatives in Cajun English.

Language Variation and Change, 10 (3), 245-261.

Dubois and Horvath examine the realization of the English interdental fricative among a community of fluent French-bilingual Cajun English speakers in Louisiana. They examine the degree to which the voiced (dh) and voiceless (th) English interdental fricatives are realized in the speech of the Cajun English speakers (as stops or as fricatives). Their analysis accounts for the age and sex of the speakers as well as whether or not the speakers have closed or open social networks. Ultimately they find the best predictors of fricative stopping is the combination of social network and sex, with somewhat opposite results--men with open social networks are more likely to stop, whereas women with closed networks are more likely to stop. They conclude that this is due to the stopped variant being particularly salient to indexing male identity in the community, whereas for the women, it is more mutable and more likely to change as they interact with non Cajun-English speakers.

Some important points about method for my own use:

D and H found four times as many (dh) as (th)

coded all words, but only analyzed fully dental variants

coded all words for the following linguistic features:

• stress
• # of syllables
• lexical category
• if function word, type of function word
• preceding phonological variant

Thomas 2007

Thomas, Erik R. 2007. Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5 (2007): 450–475.

In his very thorough article, Thomas outlines a large number of phonological and phonetic variables in African American English (AAE) and suggests ways we might study these variables in the comparison and contrast to European American varieties, particularly Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE). Thomas argues that although a great deal of research on AAE has dealt with morphosyntactic variation, phonological and phonetic variables represent the richest information source for how AAE is changing.

Thomas examines a number of consonental variables:

• consnential lexical variations (sk, sp metathesis)
• Rlessness and l-vocalilzation
• Interdental Fricative realization
• Consonant Cluster Simplicificaion/ -t/-d deletion
• rarer features, such as /skr/ for /str/

and also vowel veatures

• lack of HAPPY tensing
• PIN-PEN merger
• AAE shift
• GOOSE-GOAT fronting

Most interestingly, Thomas also includes other phonological variables beyond the most commonly studied AAE variables, such as voice quality, tone (using the ToBI system), prosody, and timing. I thought this was one of the most instructive areas in which he extended his research. Ultimately, Thomas calls for approaches which look at AAE variables on all levels of phonetics and phonology, and suggests that such an approach would have broad application not only within sociolinguistics but within other realms such as applied and educational linguistics as well.

Ethnolects and the city: Hoffman & Walker 2010

Hoffman, M. and Walker, J. A. 2010. Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language, Variation and Change. 22. 37-67.

In their 2010 article, Hoffman and Walker question whether we can assume some homogeneity within an ethnic group; whether, as Corlock and Wolick (1981) argue, there is evidence for an “ethnolect” in use across a given ethnic group. They highlight two competing requirements of variationist sociolinguistic studies, that is, that there be socially meaningful explanations for variation, and that the study of social factors be replicable. At the same time, the authors argue that much of sociolinguistics has relied on etic, externally-determined categories for determining and delineating ethic groups, and argue for an approach which combines both social psychology and variationist sociolinguistic techniques.

60 informants were chosen from Toronto, stratified for ethnic origin and generation. Data were taken from sociolinguistic interviews. The data were examined for two sociolinguistic variables, the Canadian Vowel Shift and t/d deletion. In addition to the sociolinguistic data the researchers also performed an ethnic orientation survey, judging how closely given speakers identified as a member of their ethnic group.

Through the use of multivariate statistical analysis, the authors determine significant differences between groups, but more importantly, they find significant differences within groups that are not attributable only to generational differences (i.e., time /distance from the ethnic native language). Thus they conclude that ethno linguistic variation within a multilingual, multiethnic community has less to do with imperfect acquisition, but is better understood as part of speakers’ agentive construction of identity.

Moral Geography: Modan 2007

It's interesting to think about a place having moral geography (Hall). The way the place and its use reflect the moral landscape of the people who use it--and the kinds of assumptions they make about themselves and others based on their use of the space. She specifically speaks of how spaces become characterized, and characterizes Takoma Park in particular as "lesbian space" which I find interesting and may be useful to my own projects.

Gal refers to fractal recursivity, or the ability of the same distinctions to be mapped onto increasingly smaller and smaller or larger and larger domains, in that, for example, there might be the public space of the main street compared with the private space of the residential streets, but then on the residential streets the public space of the street vs. the private space of the houses, and in the houses, the public space of the front porch vs. the private space of the back, etc. etc.

One thing I find interesting is the creation of the city as heterogeneous space, which, as Modan points out, is not entirely valid, given that much of Mt. Pleasant is made up of identical rowhouses built in large blocks, where really, any one person in the neighborhood is living in the same house as any number of her neighbors. Yet the suburbs are conceived as being homogeneous space in contrast to the heterogeneous space of the city--ethnically, architecturally, etc. This is an interesting thing to explore in terms of Takoma, because Takoma is a place where a rejection of the homogeneity is part of the ideologies of place that create Takoma; for example, the rejection of Subway and CVS, the feeling that CVS should not be a place that people see right away on Cedar St. when someone comes in.

An additional note: in this chapter, Modan looks at the cat-calling men in Pigeon Park in Mt. Pleasant and what they say to women who pass. I found some value in connecting this back to Marcyliena Morgan's work on Signifiying, and wonder how looking at this talk through Morgan's lens might be useful.

Intertextuality Definition

Intertextuality is the way in which a text (of any medium) forms its meaning by its relationship to other texts (of any medium). This may include juxtaposition to another text, repetition either verbatim or in theme only of another text, anticipating a new text which may be created in response to the text, or laminating new ideas on the framework of an old text. New focus texts are created by their moment of departure from a prior text, which often requires a draw on the prior text to see, and then are often recontextualized into a new form, which allows them to become intertexts in and of themselves. The focus text and its intertexts form a puzzle of complete pieces—while each can often be understood, or at least have some meaning on their own, the fullest expression of all the texts is reached by exploring their relationships to one another.

Morph-ology: Bakhtin 1981 excerpts

Bakhtin has his own poetic, and I'm struck by the ways in which he brings in a host of other analogies in his own writing to explain what it is he's talking about; in the case of the area I'm going to explore, the issue of light refracting off a lens to explain the way meaning changes as the heteroglossia surrounding a particular text changes the way we see it. Just as light in rarefaction through a lens changes the shape, focus, and perception of an object, so does a change in the dialogue in which a particular text is situated.

I'm talking here about Bakhtin's concept of re-accentuation, which to me, both actively pursuing and studying my hobby of fan fiction is a very interesting one. Fan fiction is by its nature a heteroglossic undertaking; it is adding an interpretation to a text which already exists, or extracting bits of that text and creating a new dialogue around them. In doing so, the meaning of that text is gradually changed bit by bit as people grow to understand the situation differently. For example, in the original book, Edward the vampire likes to watch Bella sleep; when he admits this to her, she finds this hopelessly romantic. Yet if a fan fiction writer writes a so-called "alternate universe" (AU) fanfiction where Edward, instead of being a chaste, moral vampire who drinks from animals is instead a traditional bloodthirsty killer, when that writer repeats the trope of Edward watching Bella sleep, the interpretation of the new version is much more sinister. And what is more fascinating is that this new interpretation affects not only the AU, but that of the original text as well, and moves readers to understand the original book's Edward's motives as being quite creepy rather than the hopelessly romantic gesture they may have originally felt them to be.

Bakhtin argues that as texts move through different historical periods and different groups, each one adds a different meaning to it and shapes it, because the heteroglossic fabric which surrounds the text changes each time it is moved. Yet perhaps this is the test of something which is lasting; a great text continues to grow and move, morphing into other meanings and interpretations as it makes its way through the dialogic imagination of new sets of readers.