Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery

This paper examines a group of white speakers in South Philadelphia who exhibit appropriation of African American Vernacular English /TH/-fronting. Speakers with the most antagonistic contact and most aggressive attitudes toward their African American neighbors show the highest rates of /TH/-fronting. This paper argues that appropriation of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ethnolect feature of /TH/-fronting has been reanalyzed as a marker of street smarts rather than as a marker of speakers' affiliations with AAVE speakers.

A B S T R A C T The question of how behavioral variants compete and propagate is of primary importance to the study of cultural evolution; with respect to language, it is also an important focus of the field of sociolinguistics. Variant propagation can occur by neutral means—akin to drift in biological evolution—or through selection, whereby individuals are biased in what variants they adopt. An important bias concerns social meaning, and sociolinguistic theory distinguishes between variants that are primarily associated with a particular social group (such as working-class people or Texans) and variants primarily associated with a perceived trait of the group (such as toughness). In the former case, variants are hypothesized to propagate neutrally; in the latter case, provided the trait is socially relevant to adopters, variants are hypothesized to be subject to selection and to propagate more readily. To test this hypothesis we conducted an experimental study in which groups of four participants played a game that involved instant messaging in an artificial " alien language " with two dialects. Each player was assigned to one of two alien species, the weaker Wiwos or the tougher Burls. The social meaning of one feature of the Burl dialect was manipulated, and the results strongly supported the hypothesis: Variants from the Burl dialect were used by Wiwos in all conditions, but when associated primarily with " tougher aliens " , the rate of adoption was significantly greater than when they were associated primarily with " Burls ". When toughness was made irrelevant to the game, the effect of association disappeared, emphasizing the importance of social relevance in the propagation of behavioral variants.

A B S T R A C T This is a study of the competition of linguistic systems within the speech community, tracing the opposition of distinct phonological configurations. Among younger Philadelphians oriented to higher education, the traditional short-a system is giving way to the nasal system, in which all prenasal vowels are tense. We present evidence that this shift occurs systematically in both the lax and tense allophones. The degree of conformity to each system is measured for 106 subjects by the Pillai statistic; community-wide patterns are revealed by regression modeling and bimodality diagrams. Adherence to the traditional system is greatest for White speakers who graduated from Catholic high schools, while the nasal system is strongest for graduates from elite schools with special admission requirements. African American students show no orientation to the traditional system, but parallel White students in the shift to the nasal system. The histories of students through the educational system show that the speaker's short-a system is largely determined during their middle and high school years, before entering college. Special admission interviews play a special role in this process, as brief speech events that strongly determine the person's linguistic environment for the years that follow. The concept of the linguistic variable has dominated our approach to the study of linguistic variation since its beginning in the 1960s. We frequently find discussions of pairs of variables—whether they are merged or not, or move in parallel or in chain, but these generally move within a single system. This paper launches an effort to take the linguistic system itself as a central focus and the competition between two such systems as the variable process. The concept of " system " is so deeply associated with our understanding of language that any change in language may be seen as a change in the language system. A rise in the height of the vowel in man is said to be systematic if it is found in all other tokens of short-a before front nasals, and change in that specification (e.g., " in syllables closed by front nasals ") can be considered systematic change. The present report The authors would like to acknowledge the many contributions to our understanding of the issues raised in this article from Daniel Ezra Johnson, Hilary Prichard, Gillian Sankoff, Meredith Tamminga, and Tony Kroch. We are grateful to the many undergraduate assistants who were enlisted as interviewers and transcribers and to colleagues who responded to presentations of results at New Ways of

This paper examines the transfer of (TH)-fronting, a phonological feature of African American English, into the speech of whites from South Philadelphia. While most cases of linguistic diffusion, particularly of African American English, are found in speakers with a positive affiliation with the source dialect (Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1997; Fix 2010), this paper provides a case where the white adopters of (TH)-fronting exhibit overtly hostile attitudes toward black neighbors. I argue that (TH)-fronting has been reanalyzed as an index of street orientation or masculinity by the white speakers in this study (Silverstein 2003; Eckert 2008). Furthermore, I demonstrate that the phonological constraints on borrowed (TH)-fronting has been simplified from the constraints in the source dialect. Finally, I discuss how hostile interactions may play a role in language change, allowing change not only to proceed in tandem across unexpected boundaries (e.g. Milroy and Milroy 1985), but also to be directly diffused across hostile boundaries.

The spread of cultural variants, such as dress or speech patterns , may be promoted or inhibited by different types of bias. In model-based bias, variants are differentially adopted according to characteristics of individuals exhibiting them. A surprising case of cross-group adoption comes from sociolinguistic fieldwork in which White speakers were observed exhibiting a feature of African-American Vernacular English, in spite of expressing aggressively negative attitudes towards their African-American neighbors. A likely explanation for this is that the feature in question had become dissociated for these speakers from the inalienable trait Blackness, but had retained associations with the more alienable trait of being " street " or tough. We tested this by conducting an artificial-language experiment in which groups of four participants played a computer game that involved typing instant messages to each other, trading resources, and fighting. Participants were assigned to one of two mutually antagonistic " alien species " (weaker Wiwos and tougher Burls) and learned an alien language with two species-specific dialects. In one condition, the Wiwos were told that that Burl dialect was mainly used by Burls; in the other condition they were told it was mainly used by " tougher aliens ". Burl variants were significantly more likely to be used by Wi-wos in the latter condition than in the former, even though they were associated with tougher aliens in both conditions. This suggests that cultural variants linked to more alienable traits are more likely to be adopted than those linked to inalienable ones, even if the practical implications of the two traits are very similar.

The traditional Philadelphia allophonic /æ/ system (henceforth: PHL, shown in (1) below) is characterized by a set of complicated conditioning factors and a dramatic acoustic distinction between the two allophones. In recent years, some Philadelphians have begun to exhibit a new allophonic system (NAS, shown in (2) below). Like PHL, NAS is characterized by a dramatic acoustic distinction between tense and lax allophones. NAS is quickly overtaking PHL in the Philadelphia community, as demonstrated by Labov et al. (2016).
(1) phl:æ→æh/  +anterior  ∩(  +nasal  ∪ (2) nas:æ→æh/  +nasal 
  -voice 
+fricative
)]σ
This situation offers an exciting opportunity to observe phonological change in individual speakers. Most phonological changes involve the collapse or creation of a new phonological category; because of the large degree of acoustic overlap in these situations, it is difficult or impossible to identity individual tokens as having been produced by the old or the new phonology. In the current change in Philadelphia /æ/, however, both the old and the new system involve distinct acoustic targets, making it possible to identify which underlying system was used to produce a given word. It is therefore possible to test several distinct theories about phonological change: Whether change occurs through gradual phonetic incrementation (e.g. Ohala 1981), through individual speakers producing only the old or the new system (e.g., Janda and Joseph 2003), or whether change occurs via individual speakers probabilistically producing both the old and the new system in a process of individual grammar competition (e.g., Fruehwald et al. 2013).
In my dissertation, I examine natural speech production from 46 speakers who acquired language during the period of allophonic change, with a combination of topic-directed conversations and targeted natural language experiments. Using a glm classifier, I identify tokens of /æ/ as having been produced by either PHL or NAS. In concert with an analysis of speakers’ social histories, I use these results to argue that the change from PHL to NAS in Philadelphia is driven by the mechanism of competing grammars, suggesting that both syntactic change and phonological change proceed in the same manner. My research provides one of the  first pieces of direct empirical support for a unified theory of language change in which structural changes in syntax and phonology are implemented through the same mechanism of grammar competition (Kroch, 1989; Fruehwald et al., 2013).
In addition to the theoretical contribution to phonological change, my dissertation also traces the social patterns of the allophonic change, highlighting the effect of network structure and access to elite education on the adoption of the incoming allophonic system. I also employ experimental methods to demonstrate that the abstract allophonic rules of /æ/ are the target of social evaluation and contribute to social meaning. I  find speakers producing surprisingly systematic evaluations of PHL and NAS, a result which only emerges when analyzing the evaluation of changing abstract parameters. Finally, to test whether the change from PHL to NAS was the inevitable result of phonological simplification, I developed a computational simulation built using a principle of language acquisition (Yang, 2016) to demonstrate that the allophonic restructuring in /æ/ was not the result of children simplifying their input data, but rather must have been the result of dialect contact with in-moving speakers of the new system.