Linking gender, sexuality, and affect: The linguistic and social patterning of phrase-final posttonic lengthening

Abstract

Abstract This paper furthers our understanding of the social forces driving prosodic variation by reporting on production and perception studies of phrase-final posttonic lengthening in American English. Building on past research showing gender-based variation in the production of phrase-final lengthening, I show that this gender effect surfaces only when comparing straight men and straight women. Gay men and straight women lengthen their phrase-final posttonic syllables equally, and both groups do so more than straight men. A matched-guise social-perception experiment shows that listeners associate increased lengthening not only with femininity and male gayness, but with expressive affect. I suggest that the link between increased lengthening and expressive affect is forged iconically and that this link underlies the gender and sexuality patterns observed in the production study. What surfaces from this work theoretically is how variability in expressions of affect may drive correlations between gender/sexuality-based categories and linguistic variants.

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