The social motivations of reversal: Raised bought in New York City English

Kara Becker

46 citations0/0 files storedLanguage in Society

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Linguistic Variation and Morphology Phonetics and Phonology Research Linguistic and Sociocultural Studies

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a variationist analysis of theboughtvowel in New York City English (NYCE) and finds that it has reversed the trajectory of change outlined in Labov (1966). An acoustic analysis of production data from sixty-four native residents of the Lower East Side demonstrates thatboughtis lowering in apparent time, a change led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the middle classes. A second source of data comes from perceptions of raisedboughtgathered from a matched guise experiment, which highlights an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of social meanings for raisedboughtthat comprise a ‘classic New Yorker’ persona: an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Taken together, the data suggest thatbought's reversal is motivated by its contemporary social meanings. (bought,New York City English, dialectology, variationism, sound change, social meaning, perception, sociophonetics)*

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

References

1968The Social Stratification of English in New York City.2000Sociolinguistic Patterns 1963The Social Motivation of a Sound Change 2008Variation and the indexical field 1 2012Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation 1993Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon.1972Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich 1993Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. Ed. by Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, 11.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. viii, 363. Cloth $75.00, paper $27.95.

Cited by

2019Ongoing change in post-independence São Tomé: The use of rhotics as a marker of national identity among young speakers of Santomean Portuguese 2025Language and Place 2020Prosody and ideologies of embodiment: Variation in the use of pitch and articulation rate among fitness instructors 2020Escaping the Trap : Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time 2020

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.