Rob Podesva Special Lecture Feb 10
Rob Podesva (Georgetown) will give a special lecture called ‘Quantifying and Interpreting the PIN-PEN Merger in Washington, DC’ on Thursday, February 10, 9:30-11:00 pm, in 460-126.
Abstract
The PIN-PEN merger is well attested in both Southern (Brown 1991, Baranowski 2007) and African American (Bailey and Thomas 1998, Rickford 1999, Thomas 2007) varieties of English. My current work in Washington, DC strongly suggests that even though the merger is prevalent among African American speakers, it is losing ground.
Previous sociophonetic studies have appealed to a variety of techniques for measuring mergers, including the impressionistic inspection of vowel formant plots, the difference in mean F1 or F2 between vowels, the Euclidean distance between vowel means (Harrington 2006), and the Pillai trace, a measure of overlap between two vowel distributions (Hay et al. 2006, Hall-Lew 2009). Based on an analysis of all three acoustic measures, I show that multiple measures are needed to adequately capture PIN-PEN patterns in DC. Pillai traces and Euclidean differences reveal that African American speakers merge PIN and PEN to a greater extent than white speakers, while differences in mean F1 show that younger women merge less, suggesting a change in progress that begins in the dimension of vowel height. Thus, while newer measures like Euclidean distances and Pillai traces are informative, more traditional measures like differences in mean F1 captures other crucial information.
I attribute the fact that African American speakers exhibit the merger while white speakers do not to the longstanding history of racial segregation in DC. Since the largest influx of African Americans in DC decades before the Great Migration, the city and its suburbs remain largely segregated (Manning 1998), a situation that has maintained distinct merger patterns. The finding that the merger is on its way out is likely due to more recent trends of inter-ethnic interaction, facilitated by discourses of diversity that are sweeping several of the district’s neighborhoods. I suggest that the PIN-PEN merger is losing ground in DC, even in the speech of African Americans, because it has not been enregistered (Agha 2003) as a distinctive feature of African American English, given its greater recognition as a feature of Southern varieties of English.