Personae and styles in linguistic perception
A major theme of our research examines how social constructs are linked with linguistic material in individuals’ minds, and how these links are deployed in both production and perception. Work focusing on the interactional social meaning of linguistic variation has posited that listeners take in others as social types, or personae, and that these types are linked with bundles of connected features or styles. We have examined the nature of personae in linguistic perception in a variety of paradigms and studies, and ongoing work explores how these feature bundles are represented in the mind and used in perceptual processes.
Related publications and presentations:
- D’Onofrio, Annette. 2019. Complicating categories: Personae mediate racialized expectations of non-native speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 23(4):346-366.
- D’Onofrio, Annette. Accepted. Sociolinguistic signs as cognitive representations. In Hall-Lew, Podesva & Moore, eds. Social Meaning in Linguistic Variation: Theorizing the Third Wave.
- D’Onofrio, Annette. 2018. Personae and phonetic detail in sociolinguistic signs. Language In Society. 47(4): 513-539.
- D’Onofrio, Annette. 2018. Controlled and automatic perceptions of a sociolinguistic marker. Language Variation and Change. 30(2): 261-285.
- D’Onofrio, Annette. 2015. Persona-based information shapes linguistic perception: Valley Girls and California vowels. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(2): 241-256.
- D’Onofrio, Annette, June Choe & Masaya Yoshida. 2019. Personae in syntactic processing: Socially-specified agents bias expectations of verb transitivity. (Poster presented at LSA Annual Meeting, NYC; poster presented at CUNY conference, Boulder)
The Chicagoland Language Project
This ongoing fieldwork project explores how local and historical social dynamics influence linguistic variation and change throughout the Chicago area. We have conducted fieldwork in one neighborhood area and are expanding to two additional fieldsites in the coming years. In our current corpus, we are investigating questions like the following:
- How has sociohistorical change and local social meanings and personae influenced social structuring and overall changes in place-linked vowel shifts in the area?
- How do racialized difference influence vocalic differences and apparent time change?
- How do apparent time shifts in production relate to age-based patterns of perceptual categorization?
Related publications and presentations:
- D’Onofrio, Annette & Jaime Benheim. Forthcoming. Contextualizing reversal: Local dynamics of the Northern Cities Shift in a Chicago community. Journal of Sociolinguistics.
- D’Onofrio, Annette, Jaime Benheim & Shawn Foster. 2020. Distinction without Distance: Racialized vocalic differences in an integrated Chicago community. (Presented at ADS Annual Meeting, New Orleans)
- D’Onofrio, Annette. 2019. Local dynamics of the perception-production link: Age-based patterns in a Chicago community. (Presented at LSA Annual Meeting, NYC and UKLVC, London)
- D’Onofrio, Annette & Jaime Benheim. 2018. Contextualizing reversal: Sociohistorical dynamics and the Northern Cities Shift in a Chicago neighborhood. (Presented at NWAV 47, NYC)
Regional features and the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire in Chicago
This study explores how Jewish Chicagoans’ vocalic systems integrate NYC- and Chicago-linked vowel variants in both production and perception. I argue that the use of a given element from the ethnolinguistic repertoire can be influenced by that element’s pre-existing social meaning in a particular community.
Related presentations:
- Benheim, Jaime. 2019. Regional features and the Jewish Ethnolinguistic Repertoire in Chicago. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 48, October 10-12, Eugene, Oregon and Poster presented at MidPhon 24, Milwaukee, WI.
Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers
This study uses a matched-guise task to compare listeners’ evaluations of male and female speakers producing varying proportions of a “non-standard” variant of ING (‘-in’), investigating whether listeners evaluate men and women differently for using ‘-in’ at the same rates of production. Findings show that differences in evaluations of individual speakers persist across and within gendered categories, bearing implications for notions of binary gender and single-speaker matched-guise paradigms.
Related presentations:
- Stecker, Amelia. 2019. Gender, variant frequency, and social evaluations of speakers. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 48, October 10-12, Eugene, Oregon and Poster presented at MidPhon 24, Milwaukee, WI.
Personae, styles, and enregisterment in public view
We have examined how widely broadcast performances contribute to processes of enregisterment, whereby communities of listeners come to recognize linguistic features as indexical of certain personae. Projects in this area have examined political speeches and parodic performances to understand how personae and social meanings are understood and circulated.
Related publications and presentations:
- Pratt, Teresa & Annette D’Onofrio. 2017. Jaw setting and the California Vowel Shift in parodic performance. Language in Society 46(3): 283-312.
- D’Onofrio, Annette & Amelia Stecker. 2018. The social meaning of stylistic variability: Sociophonetic (in)variance in presidential candidates’ campaign rallies. (Presented at NWAV 74, NYC).
- Redbird, Beth & Annette D’Onofrio. 2018. Politics speaks: What politicians say about the economy, and how they say it. Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research Colloquium Series. 21 May.