More creak!

These videos are from a creak-hating blog entry from 2009. The blog entry gets a lot of things about creak wrong, but the comments are fascinating! There are so many REAL HATERS of creaky voice. Like this poor girl who comments on the blog, claiming creak is ruining her life:

"You have no idea how thankful I am to have come across your blog! I have been going out of my mind over this thing for years, because it's so awful and irritating, and so ubiquitous that my poor ears feel constantly assaulted; I'm to the point where I actually dread it when someone starts to speak - I immediately tense up, and can relax only when the speaker turns out to NOT have this absurd affect (which, of course, rarely happens.) Listening to NPR is an absolute carnival of horrors in that almost every female reporter on there indulges in this annoying practice; I can't believe that there's no quality control or some sort of broadcasting standard over there. I'm thinking of sending them a letter of outrage, but I need to muster up the energy to do it - listening to that horrible creak, everywhere and all day long, really wears a person down."

Anyway, here are the videos. I don't agree that Natalie Portman's creak almost makes my ears bleed, as the commenter who suggested these videos claimed, but the fact that she doesn't say much of anything does make the phonation type not quite as charming...

This second video is really surprising - super creak used in an instructional video:

Semantic Change

"Usually we don't create words, we extend the meaning of the ones we have," Dr. Shukla, my historical linguistics professor tells us. He then gave us several examples of metaphors:

• "leaves" of a book
• the "flow" of time
• the "light" of reason
• a "cutting" remark

These words maintain a flavor of the literal with their metaphorical meaning. So, Dr. Shukla claims, at a deeper level, words are not tied to stable concepts so much as clusters of meaning; they are flexible, expandable.

Think of dull, shallow, deep, clear, heavy, light, etc., he says.

It is what makes language so beautiful and capable of expressing the great multitude of things that we feel and think as creative social beings. That words can bend and grow is what makes imagining possible.

I think this video sums it up, beautifully. (sent to me by a friend via Facebook).

Beautiful creak

The above is a sound wave (made in Praat) of an interviewee slowly answering "yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," to a question. The last two yesses (circled) are creaked. This is an excellent example of typical creaky syllables which are often quieter than modal ("normally-voiced") syllables.

Here are two close-ups to compare the waveforms of a modal yes and a creaky yes; the creaky yes has a jagged waveform and irregular glottal pulses (squared).

Modal Yes.

Creaky Yes.

I'm still not sure what social meaning it is accomplishing for this speaker in this situation (I'm still coding my data), but luckily it's easy to identify both auditorily and visually!

So "creakin'" annoying!

This SNL bad news commercial skit, besides being hilarious, is highly relevant for linguists interested in the social meaning of a popular form of phonation used by young American women: creaky voice. The star of the skit uses serious creak at the end of phrases and on words like, "apologize," "that," "is," etc. SNL's view of women using creaky voice? OBNOXIOUS.

Glamour magazine also joins in the conversation on creak in their April 2011 issue with an article called, "You're a bright woman! So...What did you just say?" Among its advice to women interviewing for jobs is to:

• avoid "upspeak" - ending non-interrogative sentences with high intonation
• get "like-osuction" (i.e. stop using "like" so much)
• and avoid creaky voice

The article makes frequent reference to a speech therapist by the last name, Chwat (seriously?), who says this type of voice sounds like, "crackling in a frying pan." Among the many attributes creak can index, according to Glamour and Chwat, are: sexy, uncertain, annoying and smugness.

Finally, another very modern example of female creak in the media is Mary-Kate Olsen's interview voice. Sexy? Uncertain? Annoying? Smug? (perhaps all of the above?)

Taking over the world

Facebook, the new Napoleon

Play nice on the FB!

The humor from This Washington Post article on what we really mean when we post to Facebook comes from the truth in what the fake posts suggest about real posts on Facebook, a truth I recognize from my own research and from what I know as a card-carrying member of the Social Network.

Facebook is different than face-to-face interaction. We can pretend not to have read stuff that we don't have anything nice to say about. And we can put our best foot (face) forward at all times, and allow others to do the same! (by using lots of happy punctuation marks and symbols =0)

I particularly like this example from the article, (Petri, Alexandra, from "What we really mean when we post on Facebook." Washington Post Blog. Posted at 12:54 PM ET, 01/31/2011,http://voices.washingtonpost.com/compost/2011/01/what_we_really_mean_when_we_po.html)

Facebook gives us so many outs to having to do any real work to save face.

But I am NOT a doom-and-gloom sayer about our online social lives. I think Facebook and other new media are very positive additions to society. (And that everyone who says otherwise is just a scared old curmudgeon.) I love the glimpses into the lives of my friends who would probably not have called or emailed me to share the same news, but who I now can congratulate or sympathize with both on the FB and next time we hang out.

I understand how it may be hard to see all the glamor and glitter people constantly put forth, but if we all remember that it's everybody's Facebook self (like the air-brushed people in magazines) maybe we'll be less-likely to compare our offline selves to the online personas we see (and we'll just do a bit more air-brushing on our own FB persona and enjoy the glam!)

Footnote: this does NOT include what goes on on politician pages where manners fly out the window. (See Lisa Jackson's Facebook page for an example of people being nasty).

Language is human

Not knowing about the history of the words you speak is like not knowing your spouse's past. You can still get along and reproduce but...thats not exactly a deep meaningful relationship. We are married to our language. (something my historical linguistics professor said last week, paraphrased).

He teaches us about language families, sound changes and why letters have the shapes they do and the alphabet the order it does. (C and G look very similar for a reason - some languages transcribed the voiceless counterpart of the velar plosive as /c/ instead of /k/).

Do you ever wonder why English is so romancy (as in the Romance languages), when it is a Germanic language?? Answer: The Norman Conquest!!

He is a brilliant man teaching a subject that often gets overlooked as the pursuit of a few aficionados, but each class he closes by telling us why we might care about the history of languages. I'm afraid, at times, he might feel a bit like Noam Chomsky attempting to explain language to Ali G.

How we say what we mean

Recently, linguists have begun to study a fascinating intersection of language: discourse and the 'paralinguistic' phenomena that help accomplish social meaning. Conversations are potentially messy social situations, yet we manage to communicate in groups without cue cards telling us when to come in, when someone's turn is complete, etc. One of the ways talk is managed is by the production and perception of paralinguistic phenomena such as pitch, intonation, tempo, and voice quality that mark important discursive events. Apparently how we say something is every bit as important as what we say.

Ogden, R. (2006). Phonation and social action in agreements and disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics (38): 1752-1775.

Ogden uses data from corpora of natural conversations and identifies similar stretches of talk based on linguistic and pragmatic aspects. Specifically, he identifies instances of agreement and disagreement based on the concept of “assessments” and their structure from the field of Conversation Analysis. Ogden uses a pitch track created in Praat to compare the utterances. He finds that the assessments that agree with a previous opinion by a different speaker use a large pitch span (including some creaky voice), “dynamic pitch contours,” slower tempo, and “tenser articulations” (1762). Overt disagreements also share these aspects but are timed directly on the heels of the first speaker’s utterance. Indirect disagreements padded with an initial weak agreement were produced more quickly and quietly (1767), the weak agreement ending in a low-high contour (1768).

A recent study of creaky voice

Yuasa. (2010). Creaky voice: A new feminine voice quality for young urban oriented upwardly mobile American women? American Speech. 85(3): 315-337.

Yuasa conducts a two-part study of creak: an auditory and acoustic analysis of creaky voice in young speakers and a perception survey completed by college students about the social significance of women’s use of creak in natural conversation. The conversations average ten minutes in length and focus on the topic of food, what she sees to be a neutral topic (but is this actually neutral, and how is it "natural" to control for topic?)

Yuasa counts creaky voice at the word level, in a 401-word sample taken randomly from each recording. She locates creak auditorily and confirms her assessment using the program Praat to look at the waveforms and spectrograms of the words. For her statistical assessment of the data, Yuasa uses a t-test. She finds that the differences between the American female speakers and the American men (p = 0.0133) and the American female speakers and the Japanese female speakers (p = 0.0267) is significant; American women have a higher rate of use of creak.

The perception study includes 175 college students in both Northern California and Eastern Iowa who listened to and responded to questions about audio files online (one modal voice recording and one creaky voice recording from the same female speaker). Then they were asked 1.) if they heard the second type of voice (creak) a lot where they live and 2.) what traits the women in the recordings project just with their voice and 3) to rate the women's characteristics based on their voice quality with predetermined binary choices such as formal versus informal.

Many of the participants in the survey remarked that they often heard creak where they lived and that the voice type suggests the following attributes: hesitant, informal, non-aggressive, as well as educated, professional and urban. Yuasa suggests that young American women may be using creaky voice more to continue the trend of “lowering” their voices to reappropriate creak as portraying the contemporary, urban and upwardly-mobile woman.

While the above study is thought-provoking and Yuasa's analysis is intriguing, saying that creaky voice indexes numerous characteristics at once (based on survey questions that gave participants binary choices, perhaps forcing some responses) for American women in general is an ambitious claim that requires much more research, especially since the social meaning of creaky voice and women has only recently been a topic of study.

The best-dressed names!

I would like to take a moment to salute the namers at modcloth. True, blogging about my favorite dress store gives me a great excuse to "research" their latest products, but it also deserves the attention. I have to admit that while I was immediately crushing on their dress designs, I was absolutely in LOVE with their dress names from my first visit to the site.

They post a dozen new dresses a day and never seem to run out of brilliant new labels:

"Cara-melting in your Arms" for a brown and gold dress

"Give me S'more" for a design that is white on top with brown sleeves and a brown skirt

The words carry several meanings and do a great job describing different aspects of the dress. They are, to use a linguisticky term, Intertextual. The words, when placed in a new phrase, still carry something of their usual meaning while also absorbing the meaning of the context, which creates a new word or phrase that is a blend of the old individual meanings.

Modcloth's favorite naming technique seems to be the use of homonyms:

• "The Goodness Grey-cious Dress" - a grey dress that's dainty like a Southern Bell

Or near-homonyms:

• "Lace is More" for a little, sleeveless lacey number.

One of my favorite names (though the dress is not as appealing as its title), is a very clever name that is not quite a homonym in the traditional sense:

• "Eyelet up the Room Dress"

They also use imperfect rhymes (when the stressed syllables don't match up):

• "Happy to be O-live Dress" - it's dark green and a playful design

How about their use of pop culture and a half rhyme?

• "The Cliffs of Urbanity Dress" - (that's right, like the Cliffs of Insanity from the cult classic, Princess Bride) - it's a brown and grey tattered design (ironically, the dress itself looks like something a crazy person would wear.)

They also use assonance, a word I just learned, which means the vocalic sounds match:

• "Swede Dreams" - which is reminiscent of Stockholm according to the dress description.

Occasionally, they might be stretching it a little, and embarrass themselves:

• "Indescribable Blue-ty Dress" - that's right, it's a blue dress

Maybe no one else enjoys this kind of thing as much as I do. My boyfriend's and my favorite game is who can be the cheeziest with play-on-words. For example, when shopping for boring vegetables in a weak attempt to be healthy one of us might say (as we did last week), "Cucumber? More like puke-cumber!" And it never fails to make us smile and think we're clever.

Note: there are actually people who name things for a living (and work for companies like Catchword, co-founded by a linguist). Funnest career EVER.

Note2: After writing this blog, I am seeing a very unfortunate pattern: all the cutest names are for the ugliest dresses. Oh well - it works!

What is Footing?

Footing is the social act of adjusting the manner of speech, such as tone of voice, gestures, word choice, etc. to that which is relevant to the current listeners (Goffman, 1981).

We speak differently to a mother than to a child, and different to a child when her mother's present. And different to adults when children are present. We alter our vocabulary (I must alter mine considerably to avoid bad language when sitting next to a family, say at the bowling alley, when I want to yell one thing after a gutter ball, but I G-rate it instead). We change our tone. A parent may not scold her child the same way, at the same volume, in public with people listening than she would without that same audience.

People also do this in their online interactions. Think about how you alter what you write on your wall, versus what you write in a private message on Facebook. Or how have our posts on the ole' FB have changed since our parents joined and friended us.

Get to GURT!

If you are interested in the intersection of language and new media, you should be very interested in this years Georgetown University Round Table, known as GURT. Especially if you are in the DC area, this should be something you put on your calendar: March 10-13.

For those less familiar with the topic, let me introduce you to a few of the presenters:

• Androutsopoulos is quite well-known for his sociolinguistic publications, as well as his work in German linguistics, and has authored many books and articles on Computer-Mediated Discourse (CMD).
• Susan Herring has been a leader in the movement of linguistic research in CMD and her work has provided a basis for much of the methodology that has developed in this area.
• Deborah Tannen is famous for her work in Discourse Analysis and has recently become interested in applying DA to online interactions.

I am particularly excited about this year's GURT because the three above presenters have written much of the literature that forms the references section for my own research in language on Facebook.

Check out the website for GURT 2011 for more information.

Facebook Linguistics Project

Official Consent Form
“Facework on Facebook”

Dear Friends and Family,

I am collecting data for sociolinguistic research as a Ph.D. student in linguistics at Georgetown University. The investigation focuses on Facebook social and discursive practices between family members and friends. My goal is to obtain permission from as many as sixty Facebook users. The project’s objective is to look at an environment where people “talk” through written words via technology, a subject that is, understandably, rapidly becoming a popular topic.

If you agree to take part in this study, I will collect instances of conversation from your Wall and those you post via wall-to-wall with friends and family. No personal or identifying information about you or any participant (except sex and age group) will be used or recorded, and all names and places from messages I use will be replaced with a space (i.e. _______ ). The data is meant to examine language variation and general trends in Facebook social practices.

Participation in this project is entirely voluntary. By volunteering to participate, you allow me to look at instances of conversation that you post on your own or others’ walls.
There are no risks involved from participation in this study, and no benefits from participating either. You are free to opt out at any time by contacting me by email requesting I remove your data from the study.

Feel free to email me if you have questions or want more details about the project, and if not, please email a simple “yes” or “no” regarding your permission. By responding “yes,” you are allowing me to collect any posting you author on your own wall or someone else’s.

Thank you so much for considering,

Laura West

lewjamster@gmail.com
Student, Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics
Georgetown University

I can do nothing for you...

as far as explaining the speaking style in True Grit. Of course, when I came out of the movie with my family, I had to pretend to know something about language, since the way the characters spoke bothered my sister, and I am the resident linguist. My guess was that the lack of contractions was probably a rather accurate portrayal of an earlier American dialect, but that was a guess based on very little actual knowledge. I also assumed the author wanted to mark the language as being from another time and place (since we know there were many differences in the way of talking between today and days of old), but I really, honestly had no idea. I just felt a need to defend the language choices of the author and directors because I really liked the movie.

I think we're better off referring to an actual active linguist blogger for insight into this one, who seems to conclude that the real reason behind the language choice may be no more than an artistic choice of the author in this case (and he reaches this conclusion by applying linguistics!)

Prescriptive Linguistics

I like it ALOT!

My favorite example of my least favorite thing: Prescriptivism.

Still learning how to use a blog

Going all the way

Href

It's a link, yall

Check this out

Jolene, by the way, is the name of my cat.

Vending Machines, Manholes and Fire Hydrants

OK, so I'm all for creativity, but this is DERANGED and DELUSIONAL.

Look closely at the vending machine closest to the camera; IT HAS FEET.

That is because it is actually an OUTFIT designed by a woman in Japan to disguise people from would-be muggers/assailants. Why?

“It is just easier for Japanese to hide,” Ms. Tsukioka said. “Making a scene would be too embarrassing.” She said her vending machine disguise was inspired by a trick used by the ancient ninja, who cloaked themselves in black blankets at night."

Ah, yes, the anciet ninja, of course. I'm sure he would be especially impressed with the following:

"Take the “manhole bag,” a purse that can hide valuables by unfolding to look like a sewer cover. Lay it on the street with your wallet inside, and unwitting thieves are supposed to walk right by." (By "unwitting" I'm assuming the article means "blind").

So, you might be thinking, what about the children? Aren't they just as susceptible to predators and yet too small to disguise themselves as a full-size vending machine and too big to lay down and play manhole? Don't worry; that's all been taken care of. The solution? A backpack that a child can turn inside out and stuff themselves into to look like a regular ol' firehydrant. All of this is true.

I have one word of advise to the consumers of these brilliant guises: DON'T GET CAUGHT. Seriously, be the most convincing damn soda machine/fire hydrants you can be because if a would-be criminal catches you pulling a stunt like that, you WILL get your ass kicked just on principle. (and I imagine it's not easy running in that get-up).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/world/asia/20japan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

moonbats and wingnuts

So, the governor of Boston, Deval Patrick, gave a 9/11 speech two days ago to the families who had lost loved ones in the attack, just a few comforting words to inspire continued healing during the long grieving process, to try and explain why bad things sometimes happen in the world. He just wanted to console the families and offer them a hug and an "i'm so sorry the world isn't always fair."

What was he supposed to say? Apparently, according to the article below, he should have brought a pitchfork and a torch and shouted from a chariot with spiked wheels about what bastards the extremists are and how hatred is the goal of grief.

Check it:

But my favorite part about the article, was that the author called the governor a "moonbat."
http://mpinkeyes.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/massachusettes-governor-deval-patrick-says-we-need-to-love-terrorists-during-his-sptember-11th-memorial-speech/

Moonbat (also "barking moonbat" and "moonbat crazy") is a term often used currently in U.S. politics as a political epithet referring to anyone that is liberal or on the left. "Wingnut" (or "right wing nut") is frequently preferred as the analogous epithet aimed at extremists on the political right.[1]

Oh, those silly wingnuts never cease to entertain and enrage me.