Independent Concentration, 1972-2024

Previous research has examined language change in Appalachia and has found that many Appalachian speech features are fading. Based on previous research and personal experiences, I wanted to better understand the role of the education system in affecting speech and language shifts in Appalachia. My research sought to answer two questions: is there a relationship between an Appalachian person's education level and how they use Appalachian dialectal features in their speech, and what can we learn about that relationship from hearing the experiences of Appalachian people? In order to answer these questions, I interviewed fourteen Appalachians from three adjacent counties in Western North Carolina and North Georgia. There was a range of ages and educational levels amongst the participants. I conducted a sociolinguistic interview with each participant, seeking to elicit specific speech features in tasks with varying degrees of control, ending with a free narrative section of the interview in which I asked participants for stories. Then, with four of my participants, I continued the interview to gain more qualitative data, asking them about their experiences as Appalachians, especially in the education system. From my data, I found that education level is correlated with statistical significance to the use of final vowel reduction and was-leveling, but not to monophthongization. However, I also found that other factors, such as age, gender, and having lived outside of Appalachia were also significantly correlated with these speech features. By using my qualitative data to contextualize the quantitative, it became clear that language change in Appalachia is very complex and involves several interlocutory factors, including education level, that affect how Appalachian English speakers interact with their communities and dialect. The role that the education system has on language change in Appalachia is pervasive, not because it is the biggest or sole actor in Appalachian language change, but because it upholds a race and class-based hierarchy and maintains a system of inequality through the control and standardization of language. This hierarchy can be harmful to Appalachians as well as other language-minoritized groups by creating barriers that prevent them from accessing certain opportunities. More research is needed to better understand language change and education in Appalachia, not because the dialect or heritage is necessarily disappearing, but because it's important to understand the barriers that Appalachians and others face due to the control of language so that those oppressive systems can be broken down.

Humans have a preference for minimizing effort in many physical and cognitive tasks. A number of studies have argued that the preference for reduced effort also manifests in language-related tasks. Minimized effort in communication is one part of the larger concept of communicative efficiency, a phenomenon describing linguistic pressure for least effort possible relative to highest communicative success possible. Iterated learning experiments — where individuals sequentially learn and transmit signals — have shown that communicative efficiency can also emerge in artificial communication systems. However, such experiments typically use homogeneous groups like college students. In reality, language exchange involves diverse individuals, each bringing unique cognitive, physical, and social biases. In this paper, we investigate whether a preference for reduced effort (as one part of communicative efficiency) manifests in non-verbal communication systems with participants of greater demographic variation. We use anonymized data from an iterated learning experiment conducted by the FLESH team at Leibniz Institute for General Linguistics. In their experiment, 60 individuals (ages 9-80) learned and taught five gestures representing concepts within three separate chains (i.e., 20 individuals per chain). Using computer-vision-based motion tracking, we extracted features measuring effort — gesture space, temporal variability, and sample entropy —for each gesture as it progressed through the chains. Mirroring previous findings, we hypothesized that gestures at the end of the chains will be less effortful (e.g., reduced gesture space). We also anticipated that participant demographics (i.e., age and extroversion) affect gesture evolution. Our results show no reliable relationship between generation number and the effort measures or between the demographics (age, extroversion, and gender) and the effort measures. However, we did find slight differences in effort measures depending on the gesture concept, indicating that the signal being transmitted may affect the way it is transmitted. These findings highlight the complex, nonlinear nature of transmission in human communication and remind us that individuals are not perfect learners and teachers, nor passive transmitters of information. Individuals inject their own cognitive, physical, perceptual, or expressive tendencies which influence the way they engage in communication. This knowledge is relevant for any field that seeks to understand how individuals interact with one another and how they disseminate information from one to another.

Tone-melody matching has been a subject of great interest in the field of linguistics. Generally speaking, music in tone languages takes both linguistic pitch and melodic pitch into account, and attempts to match the direction of movement of the two. A yet understudied area, however, has been tone-melody matching in languages experiencing tonogenesis. Seoul Korean is one such language, where aspirated and plain voiceless stops are merging in terms of VOT, and difference in F0 is taking its place as the distinguishing feature. This study explores whether similar tone-melody matching patterns appear in the music of an emerging tone language as does in that of an established tone language. 1092 bigrams from nine K-Pop songs released in the last five years were analyzed, and no clear effect was observed, suggesting the Seoul Korean tonogenetic shift is not yet complete, or that it has not extended to K-Pop music. However, the study brought to light many intriguing questions which present opportunities for future research.

This thesis investigates the root-and-pattern, nonconcatenative morphology of Akkadian finite verbs. Like other Semitic languages, Akkadian’s root-and-pattern morphology poses many challenges to concatenative theories of morphology like DM. I present a novel account of root-internal vowels in Akkadian, leveraging the previously described but underutilized phonological processes of epenthesis, syncope, and featural overwriting to argue for the distribution of vocalic featural morphemes across multiple nodes in an underlying syntactic structure. The approach I develop and call distributed vowels is a synthesis of previous DM and stem-based accounts of Semitic nonconcatenative morphology. My analysis has many implications for morphophonological analyses of Semitic languages as it argues for the presence of underlying vowels in Akkadian roots and expands the use of featural overwriting presented in previous DM approaches to root-and-pattern morphology.

Yeshivish English, a subcategory of Jewish English spoken by some Orthodox Jews, incorporates thousands of loanwords from Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, and Yiddish. Loan nouns in Yeshivish English sometimes take plural morphemes from Hebrew, Yiddish, or English, in seemingly free variation. In this thesis, I analyze 902 Orthodox Jews’ acceptability ratings of various plural forms for 22 loan nouns. I conclude that Yeshivish English speakers use a variety of phonetic and morphological strategies to pluralize loan nouns, but that some nouns exhibit more variation than others. In some cases, pluralization strategies are motivated by demographic factors, such as a speaker’s linguistic background or religious identity, or by linguistic factors, such as a noun’s phonotactic properties. Many participant comments expressed a belief that some allomorphs were associated with certain demographic characteristics. Many participants also reported codeswitching between different allomorphs depending on their interlocutors’ identities. This thesis, which highlights an understudied speaker community, has implications for the classification of Yeshivish English as a Jewish language and as a language contact phenomenon.

Occitan, a Gallo-Romance language spoken in the South of France, exists at an interesting nexus – it has been documented since the Middle Ages to exhibit polymorphy, the free variation of forms with identical semantic and pragmatic value, and also has been undergoing language attrition for centuries. Current literature has suggested that Occitan verbal polymorphy, in which up to four paradigms for a given verb can exist in free variation, has phonological roots and cannot be correlated with attrition at all, a surprising result given that attrition has infiltrated almost every aspect of Occitan grammar. Much of the polymorphy presented in the literature, however, cannot be explained solely through phonology, necessitating a morphological analysis. This thesis presents a novel analysis of Occitan verbal morphology and polymorphy through a Distributed Morphology framework, first analyzing verbs in the standard dialect and then extending into polymorphic paradigms. In addition to elucidating the vocabulary items and underlying rules governing standard verbal morphology, this analysis yields seven morphological processes that generate polymorphism in Occitan, all of which are correlated to language attrition patterns. While this does not imply that polymorphy and language decay are inherently linked in all circumstances, it indicates that Occitan morphology and grammar cannot be extricated from its sociolinguistic situation, suggesting future avenues for research in attrition, polymorphy, and minority languages.