Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research Article| May 01 2018 New York City English in Film: Phonological Change in Reel Time Charles Boberg Charles Boberg McGill University charles boberg is associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He is a coauthor, with William Labov and Sharon Ash, of the Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) and the author of The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, 2010). Most recently he coedited, with John Nerbonne and Dominic Watt, The Handbook of Dialectology (Wiley Blackwell, 2018). His current research focuses on variation and change in the vocabulary and phonetics of Canadian English, as well as on accent variation in North American film and television. E-mail: charles.boberg@mcgill.ca. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2018) 93 (2): 153–185. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-6926135 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Charles Boberg; New York City English in Film: Phonological Change in Reel Time. American Speech 1 May 2018; 93 (2): 153–185. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-6926135 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyAmerican Speech Search Advanced Search This article analyzes the frequency of three traditional features of New York City English—vocalized /r/, raised tense /æh/(bath), and raised tense /oh/(thought)—in the on-screen speech of 22 actors raised in the greater New York City region, in a diachronic selection of films that appeared between 1933 and 2003. Vocalization of /r/is coded impressionistically as either present or absent; the vocalic variables are subjected to acoustic analysis. The resulting data show that the prevalence of New York City features in the actors' speech closely parallels that identified in both historical accounts of New York City English and more recent sociolinguistic studies of the speech of ordinary people. The data also correspond well with previous research on nonfilm speech in showing a decline in the frequency of traditional variants starting in the 1960s, at least for some speakers. Sociolinguistic analysis of more recent films and characters indicates a shifting social evaluation of traditional New York City English. This underlies a divergence between speakers who continue to use traditional dialect features, which now have exclusively covert, local prestige, and those who converge with nonlocal speech norms, which carry overt, global prestige. American English, phonological variation, acoustic phonetics, sociolinguistics, language change The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 American Dialect Society2018 You do not currently have access to this content.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".