The Department of Spanish and Portuguese invites you to a lecture by
Dr. Ronald Beline Mendes
University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil
On the in(ter)dependence of grammatical and phonetic variables in perception
Thursday, October 17th
1-1:50 pm
Modern Languages 205
Dr. Beline Mendes is a sociolinguist at the University of São Paulo, where he serves as the Chair of the Department of Linguistics. His research focuses mainly on the social meaning of language use, with special interest in the way language indexes social categories related to gender, sexuality, and social class. He is the co-editor of Language, sexuality, and power: Studies in intersectional sociolinguistics (2012, Oxford University Press), and the author of several articles that appear in Language and Linguistics Compass, International Perspectives on Gender and Language, Aspect in Grammatical Variation, among others.
Abstract:
The literature on indexicality (Ochs 1992, Silverstein 2003, Eckert 2008, among others) as well as work on perception that focuses on more than one variable (Munson et al. 2006, Levon 2007, Campbell-Kibler 2011) suggests that we can expect interaction between variants in the indexation of social meanings. In addition, the conception of style as a complex clustering of variants in production (Podesva 2006, Eckert 2016) implies that variants are interdependent in perception. However, most of the research addressing variant interaction in perception deals with phonetic variables. Two exceptions are Levon & Buchstaller (2015) and Mendes (2016), which show independent effects of morphosyntactic and phonetic variants in perceived professionalism and masculinity/femininity, respectively.
Using the matched-guise technique with naturally-occurring speech from one female and one male speaker of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), I designed an online experiment in which three variables are combined: (EN) – the pronunciation of nasal /e/ (as a dipthong or a monophthong, in words like setenta ‘seventy’), (r) – coda /r/ as a tap or a retroflex (in words like parte ‘part’), and (NP-agr) – NP number agreement (standard or nonstandard, as in as mesas or as mesa-Ø ‘the tables’). The stimuli contrasted only in terms of these variants and their combination. Each of the 469 participants listened to two stimuli (one by each speaker), and rated them on a variety of scales, including perceived education, region, intelligence, friendliness, masculinity, femininity, and ‘Paulistanity’ (the quality of sounding like a person from São Paulo). In this presentation, I discuss the results of this experiment, with special attention to the (conjoint or independent) effects of morphosyntactic and phonetic variables on sociolinguistic perception.
ALSO:
Dr. Beline Mendes will be available to meet with students individually on Thursday, Oct 17th, from 8:30-11:30 am. Please contact Professor Ana Carvalho at anac@arizona.edu to make an appointment with him.
We will also extend our conversations with him during a Happy Hour at Gentle Ben’s on Thursday, 5:30 pm. Everyone is welcome.
