English in the Southern United States phần 7 docx

3.3 VocabularyIt is difficult to do justice to the lexicon of enclave dialect communities given theenormity of lexical differences in the dialects of American English.. For example,Montgo

3.3 Vocabulary

It is difficult to do justice to the lexicon of enclave dialect communities given theenormity of lexical differences in the dialects of American English For example,Montgomery and Hall’s (forthcoming) dialect dictionary of Smoky Mountain

speech features well over 1,000 items for this region, and the Dictionary of Regional American English (Cassidy et al 1986, 1991, 1996) will include six huge volumes

when it is finally completed in the next decade At best, we can only hope toillustrate selectively some of the trends found in the respective lexicons of enclavedialect communities

To begin with, we observe that there are relatively few lexical items restricted

to a single dialect community In studies of historic enclave situations such asOcracoke (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1997), Tangier Island (Shores 2000), theSmoky Mountains (Montgomery and Hall forthcoming), and Lumbee English(Locklear, Wolfram, Schilling-Estes, and Dannenberg 1999), there is a relativelyshort list of items that are exclusively used in these respective communities Localgeography and labels for “insiders” and “outsiders” are, however, among thoseusually on the list of unique items, along with some terms for local activities Thus,

only on the Outer Banks, particularly in Ocracoke, is the term dingbatter used for an outsider The term dingbatter was adopted from the TV sitcom All in the Family to refer to anyone who cannot trace their genealogy to several generations

of island residency, whereas O’cocker is reserved for ancestral islanders In some small rural communities of Appalachia and the Southeast, the term foreigner

as “someone from another country” is metaphorically extended to include anyperson who is not from the community, regardless of their place of origin Local

geography and social relations are often implicated in labels so that on the swamp

is used for “neighborhood” among the Lumbee Indians in Robeson County, and

the local terms brickhouse Indian “high-status community member” and swamp Indian “common community member” refer to relative social position within the community Similarly, Creekers and Pointers refers to local neighborhoods on the

island of Ocracoke, with an implied historical difference in status, and the term

yarney is used by both Tangier Islanders and Smith Islanders in the Chesapeake

Bay to refer to residents of the other island

Local activities and objects may also have community-specific labels For

exam-ple, we have not found terms like meehonkey, the traditional Ocracoke version of

“hide and seek” and Russian rat, the local label for the marshland rodent “nutria” outside of this community Similarly, we have not found the Lumbee term ellick

“coffee with sugar” to be used anywhere outside of this community At the sametime, we have to be cautious in our conclusions On a number of occasions, wehave concluded that a term was community-specific only to find out later thatits use was somewhat more widespread than we assumed originally We found,

for example, that the term juvember “slingshot” is used not only by the Lumbees

of Robeson County but also by other social and ethnic groups in southeastern

North Carolina; similarly, we found the term call over the mail for “delivering the

Enclave dialect communities in the South 155

mail” used not only by Ocracokers (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1999) but byresidents in other island communities where the mail was announced at the dockwhen the mailboat arrived The list of unique terms in the enclave communities

we have studied firsthand turns out to be in the dozens rather than the hundreds

or thousands

Enclave dialect communities also tend to participate in broader-based regionaldialect vocabulary All of the enclave communities we have investigated share in a

more general southern lexicon that extends from the use of carry for “accompany”

or “escort” (e.g She carried him to the store), cut on/off for “turn on/off ” (e.g Cut off the light now) and mash for “push” (e.g Just mash the button) to the use

of kin(folk) for relatives and young ’uns for “children.” Of course, there are also

dialect vocabulary items that may be shared among enclave communities because

of occupational or ecological affinity, as in marine-based economies that share

fishing terminology (e.g peeler, jimmy, etc for types of crabs) or terms for coal mining in some areas of Appalachia (e.g sprag “block of wood for stopping mine cars,” laggin’ “lumber for support,” strippin’ hole “hole from strip mining,”etc.).

Though enclave communities may share regional lexical forms and create newlexical items as the need arises, they again also exhibit a tendency to retain someolder forms that have been lost in other varieties of English For example, lexical

items such as mommuck, quamish, token, vittles, and so forth have been retained

in some of the enclave communities we examined long after they disappearedfrom the speech of other English dialects However, this does not necessarilymean that their meanings have remained fixed in relation to their earlier uses

For example, in seventeenth-century English, the term mommuck meant “to tear

or shred” in a literal sense, but on the Outer Banks its meaning has been

ex-tended metaphorically to refer to “physical or mental tormenting,” as in The parents were mommucking their children Meanwhile, on the island communities

of the Chesapeake and in southern Appalachia it refers to “making a mess,” as in

He was mommucking the house Over time, enclave communities may broaden or

narrow the semantic meaning of so-called relic words, or metaphorically extendtheir reference

Table 9.3 offers a selective list of some of the lexical items representing differentenclave communities and the different alignment patterns among representativecommunities For this comparison, the dialect category “general Southern” hasbeen added to the representative list of language varieties in order to give an idea

of the presence of more broadly based regional dialects in the lexicon of enclavedialect communities

Some of the alignment patterns show natural affinities, such as the alliance ofsome lexical items in island communities in the Chesapeake Bay and Outer Banks,but others show more disconnected affinities, such as those between southernAppalachia and coastal islands And all of the communities show an overarchingaffinity with lexical items characterizing the broad-based South

Although we have focused on individual lexical items in our survey, we cannotignore the fact that that it is also possible for enclave communities to distinguish

Table 9.3 Comparative dialect profile of selective lexical items

Outer Chesapeake Coastal Lumbee Southern General

meehonky “hide and seek”

call the mail over “deliver the mail”

buck “(male) friend”

buckram “semi-stiff shelled crab”

progin’ “looking for arrowheads”

pone bread “corn bread with

molasses”

juniper “Atlantic white cedar”

slick cam “smooth water”

jimmy “mature male crab”

themselves through language-use routines Thus, in a couple of enclave

commu-nities, the designation talking backwards or over the left refers to a fairly developed

verbal ritual involving semantic inversion, for example, saying, “It sure is a nice

day” or “It ain’t raining none” on a very rainy day The use of the phrase over the left on Tangier Island (Shores 2000) to describe this activity derives from an

older reference related to “over the left shoulder,” or “contrariwise.” Although

a type of semantic inversion has been noted for other varieties of English (Holt1972), such as the use of some descriptive adjectives in African-American English

(e.g bad for “good”; uptight for “nice”), island communities such as Tangier

Is-land, neighboring Smith Island (Schilling-Estes, personal communication), andHarkers Island (Prioli 1998) on the Outer Banks of North Carolina have a moredeveloped, recognized verbal ritual that sets these communities apart from thetraditional use of irony or semantic inversion in other speech communities Theroutine apparently involves flouting conversational maxims of quality and/or

Enclave dialect communities in the South 157

relevance in evaluative speech acts related to complimenting and criticizing and

is reinforced through a set of prosodic features as well as paralinguistic cues.Certainly, descriptions of different levels of dialect in enclave dialect communi-ties should include language-use routines as well as traditional levels of languageorganization such as phonology, grammar, and lexicon

Our survey of selective enclave dialects reveals a number of differences andsimilarities in the configuration of these varieties As we noted repeatedly, dif-ferential combinations of dialect structures define these varieties more than theexistence of unique structures It is also important to observe that these commu-nities are often characterized by a set of sociolinguistic conditions that affect theirdevelopment and maintenance of language Some of these are captured in thekinds of principles set forth in Wolfram (forthcoming), selectively summarizedbriefly as follows:

Principle of dialect exclusion Discontinuities in regular communication

net-works with outside groups impede enclave dialect communities from ticipating fully in ongoing dialect diffusion that is taking place in morewidely dispersed and socially dominant population groups

par-Principle of selective change Enclave dialects may selectively retain and develop

putative dialect structures in ways that result in divergence from othervarieties, even when a common founder variety is implicated; selective con-servatism with respect to some structures, however, may be combined withaccelerated change for others

Principle of regionalization Founder effects and selective independent language

change may lead to divergence among enclave dialects as well as from morebroadly based regional dialect communities, thus resulting in a type ofregionalization for particular enclave communities

Principle of social marginalization The relegation of enclave dialect

communi-ties to subordinate, “non-mainstream” social status leads to a marginalizedsociolinguistic status for the speakers of such varieties; accordingly, thelinguistic forms found in these varieties will be socially disfavored

The principle of vernacular congruity Natural linguistic processes that involve

analogical leveling, regularization, and generalization may lead to paralleldialect configurations in quite disparate enclave dialect communities

Principle of localized identity Community members in small, historically

iso-lated communities may embrace language distinctiveness as an emblematictoken of local identity even in a post-insular state; this manifestation mayrange from selective dialect focusing to overall dialect intensification

As noted at the outset of this discussion, insularity is a relative notion and the lects of enclave communities are dynamic rather than static in their composition

dia-In fact, some of the situations we have surveyed are undergoing rapid changedue to the transformation of economic and social conditions affecting thesecommunities This dynamic is not captured by the focus on traditional dialectfeatures most often found among older, vernacular dialect speakers The reality

of the change trajectory we have observed is actually much different from thisunidimensional model For example, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, thetraditional Outer Banks dialect is clearly dissipating, found mostly now onlyamong the elderly and some middle-aged speakers but rarely among youngerspeakers (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 1995) By the same token, in the Chesa-peake Bay, the dialect seems to be intensifying among younger speakers, even asthe population of the islands decline and the communities become more open(Schilling-Estes 1997, 2000a; Schilling-Estes and Wolfram 1999; Shores 2000).The reasons for such dramatic differences in the trajectories of change are oftenmulti-dimensional, involving demographic, economic, social, and linguistic con-ditions In an important sense, the language dynamic of each community has to

be described in its own right as communities react to changing circumstances indifferent ways Although we have focused on some of the unifying sociolinguisticconditions of these situations and highlighted the similarities and differences indialect traits found in such situations, it is necessary to recognize the uniquesocial and linguistic circumstances that characterize each speech community andtheir effect on language change and maintenance within that community

10 Urbanization and the evolution of

Southern American English

distinc-to the kind of careful research exemplified by Michael Montgomery’s (1989b)

exploration of the connections between the patterns for the use of verbal -s in

southern Appalachia and those in northern Britain While the work of scholarslike Montgomery has helped clarify the origins of some SAE features, a growingbody of research over the last ten years has shown that many other characteristics

of SAE cannot be traced to British roots or correlated with settlement history.2Infact, this research suggests that many of the prototypical features of SAE eitheremerged or became widespread during the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-tury or later and that many older SAE features have been disappearing rapidly.The ultimate consequence of such research is that innovation and change, ratherthan preservation and stability, may well be the most important factors in thedevelopment of SAE Innovation and change are so widespread that Schneider(forthcoming) has suggested a distinction be made between “traditional” and

“new” SAE An examination of the work that documents rapid and widespreadchange in SAE more than justifies such a distinction and suggests a history of SAEthat shows a dialect characterized by its dynamism, adaptability, and responsive-ness to demographic and cultural change rather than a variety mired in its past

The studies that document widespread change in SAE examine a broad range ofboth phonological and grammatical features Figures 10.1–10.11 summarize the

159

TN Civil War Vet Questionnaires

LAMSAS North Carolina

LAGS Tennessee

Figure 10.1 The evolution of the pin/pen merger in Tennessee (Brown 1991)

results from eight of these studies as well as additional data on change in SAE

from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) The work of Brown (1991),

figure 10.1, on the merger of /ε/ and // before nasals (so that pen becomes homophonous with pin) provides a clear demonstration of a stereotypical feature

of SAE that only became widespread after 1875 To explore the merger, Brownused three primary sources of evidence: (1) the Tennessee Civil War Veterans’

Questionnaires, (2) the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), and (3) LAGS The data from these three sources show that before

1875 the pen/pin merger was relatively infrequent in the South After 1875 the

merger began to expand rapidly until by World War II more than 90 percent ofthe informants Brown examined had the merger The convergence of evidencefrom these three different sources and from supplementary tape recordings ofinformants whose dates of birth span the period from 1844 to 1974 lends credence

to Brown’s (1991) conclusions

The merger of /ε/ and // before nasals, however, is not the only linguisticchange in SAE to have begun in the last quarter of the nineteenth century WhileBrown’s study shows the rapid expansion of a phonological stereotype of SAEafter 1875, the work of Krueger (2001), figure 10.2, shows the rapid decline in the

use of a grammatical stereotype, perfective done (as in we’ve done fixed it), during the same time period Using evidence from LAGS, Krueger’s study shows that

Urbanization and Southern American English 161

Figure 10.3 The loss of /h/ in /hw/ clusters in Southern American English (Reed 1991)

more than 60 percent of the informants born before 1890 use perfective done, but

less than 15 percent born after 1950 use the feature

The work of Reed (1991), figure 10.3, on the loss of /h/ in initial /hw/

clusters (which makes which homophonous with witch) shows the decline of

another well-known feature of SAE phonology; however, the time frame for the

Figure 10.4 The evolution of inceptives in Southern American English (Bean 1991)

loss of this feature is different from that for the decline of perfective done Based

on evidence from the Tennessee Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires, LAGS, and

a Phonological Survey of Texas (PST), Reed (1991) concludes that before 1890the preservation of /h/ was almost universal in the South After 1890 the loss

of /h/ began to spread gradually, but Reed’s data suggest that the expansion ofthis feature was primarily a post-1935 development As figure 10.3 shows, in thecohort born between 1926 and 1935, slightly less than 20 percent have the loss

of /h/ Among the cohort born between 1936 and 1945, almost 60 percent lost/h/ in /hw/ clusters The loss of /h/ among Reed’s informants born after 1966was nearly universal.3

Two other studies parallel Reed’s in demonstrating rapid change in SAE ginning around the time of World War II Bean (1991), figures 10.4 and 10.5,

be-examines the development of SAE inceptives such as go to as in I went to laughing and couldn’t stop and get to as in we got to talking and missed the bus Using evidence from the Tennessee Civil War Veterans’ Questionnaires and LAGS, Bean shows that go to was by far the dominant form in earlier SAE After 1900, and especially after 1940, get to began to expand rapidly at the expense of go to Our data from

a Survey of Oklahoma Dialects (SOD) suggest that get to is now the inceptive of

choice in SAE In the SOD telephone survey, 79.3 percent of the respondents

prefer get to to go to; in the field survey, 88.9 percent do.4

Urbanization and Southern American English 163

Figure 10.5 Apparent-time distributions of go to and get to in inceptives in LAGS (Bean

Figure 10.6 The loss of long offglides in /æ/ (Schremp 1995)

The work of Schremp (1995), figure 10.6, on the occurrence of long offglides in/æ/ (so that /bæg/ is pronounced [bæg]) again shows rapid change in progressafter World War II Before World War II, pronunciations such as [bæg] were rel-

atively common in the South, occurring among roughly a third of the LAMSAS,

tion of postvocalic /r/ (e.g in four and ford ) and syllabic /r/ (e.g in fur, first, and father) in Mississippi and Louisiana shows the expansion of r-ful or constricted /r/ in these traditionally r-less areas Lambert analyzes tokens of postvocalic and syllabic /r/ using a constriction or r-fullness scale, with zero indicating to-

kens with no constriction and four indicating those with full constriction As

figure 10.7 illustrates, r-ful pronunciations have expanded rapidly in all ments in this traditionally r-less area since World War II.

environ-Taken as a whole, then, the work of Brown (1991), Krueger (2001), Reed(1991), Bean (1991), Schremp (1995), and Lambert (1995) suggests widespreadand rapid change in SAE, with changes gathering momentum during two timeperiods: the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the time around World

War II An examination of evidence from LAGS on eight more features of SAE

provides additional confirmation of the results of these studies

Figures 10.8 and 10.9 provide apparent-time data from LAGS on five

reces-sive and three innovative features of SAE The data for both figures are taken

directly from LAGS, volume 6: The Social Matrix (Pederson et al 1991) The five

Urbanization and Southern American English 165

0 subject relatives

Figure 10.8 Apparent-time distribution of five grammatical features of Southern

Amer-ican English (LAGS, vol 6)

lax vowel in Mary

Figure 10.9 Apparent-time distribution of three Southern American English features

(LAGS, vol 6)

recessive features include (1) a-prefixing as in They were a-laughing and a-singing; (2) plural verbal -s as in The children knows they have to do their chores; (3) preterit come as in He come down here last week; (4) preverbal liketa as in I liketa fell out

of my chair; and (5) zero-subject relatives as in The people live next door are real