Search for: All records

This paper explores variability in the fundamental frequency (f0) of utterances containing the remote past marker BIN in African American English, which has been described as having higher f0, intensity and duration relative to preceding material, and reduced f0 following, though with some interspeaker variability (Green et al. 2022). Here we re-analyze data from Green et al. (2022) to characterize the space of possible phonetic realizations of BIN utterances. We computed the 90th percentile f0 value in pre-/on-/post-BIN regions to create a 3-point "topline" f0 shape profile of the utterance (Cooper & Sorensen 1981) and performed time series clustering and principal components analysis (PCA). Two clusters were identified, one with higher f0 on BIN and lower f0 post-BIN, and one with lower f0 on BIN and higher f0 post-BIN. Results from PCA indicate speakers vary along two dimensions: one relating to pre-BIN f0 and one to post-BIN f0. Both dimensions were tied to f0 height on BIN, demonstrating the role that global aspects of the contour play in the variability. We show how the topline representation of f0 contour shape is robust to missing values and uncontrolled sentences and thus useful for naturalistic speech. 

As in many linguistics subfields, studies of prosody have mainly focused on majority languages and dialects and on speakers who hold power in social structures. The goal of this Special Issue is to diversify prosody research in terms of the languages and dialects being investigated, as well as the social structures that influence prosodic variation. The Special Issue brings together prosody researchers and researchers exploring sociological variation in prosody, with a focus on the prosody of marginalized dialects and on prosodic differences based on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. The papers in this volume don’t just advance our understanding of critical issues in sociolinguistics, but they also challenge some of the received wisdom in the exploration of sociolinguistic influences on prosody. Not only does this collection highlight the value of this work to informing theories of prosodic variation and change, but the collected papers also provide examples of methodological innovations in the field that will be valuable for all prosody researchers. 

This paper jointly considers syntactic, semantic, and phonological/phonetic factors in approaching an understanding of BIN, a remote past marker in African American English that has been described as “stressed.” It brings together data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) and a production study in a small African American English-speaking community in southwest Louisiana to investigate the use and phonetic realization of BIN constructions. Only 20 instances of BIN constructions were found in CORAAL. This sparsity was not simply due to a dearth of semantic contexts for BIN in the interviews, since 122 instances of semantically equivalent been + temporal adverbial variants were also found. These results raise questions about the extent to which BIN constructions and been + temporal adverbial variants are used in different pragmatic and discourse contexts as well as in different speech styles. The production study elicited BIN and past participle been constructions in controlled syntactic and semantic environments. The phonetic realization of BIN was found to be distributed over the entire utterance rather than localized to BIN. BIN utterances were distinguished from past participle been utterances by having higher ratios of fundamental frequency (F0), intensity, and duration in BIN/ been relative to preceding and following material in the utterance. In both studies, BIN utterances were generally realized with a high F0 peak on BIN and a reduced F0 range in the post- BIN region, with variability in the presence and kinds of F0 movements utterance-initially and utterance-finally, as well as in F0 downtrends in the post- BIN region.