This is a follow-up to the entry that I posted on August 5, 2005. I have been planning for a number of weeks to write a blog entry on intonational meaning, using audio examples from a spoken word audio CD by Lynda Barry called "The Lynda Barry Experience" (see my August 5 posting if you don't know who Lynda Barry is, and see my review on amazon.com if you want to know what "The Lynda Barry Experience" is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1882543173/102-4366587-6936920?v=glance). That blog entry was focused on the concept of "uptalk," and how it provides an opportunity for a tutorial on intonational meaning, at least as it has been theorized by Janet Pierrehumbert and Julia Hirschberg. I have been working hard on this blog, making pitch tracks using Praat (http://www.praat.org) and writing text that my legion of blog readers will find interesting and digestible. Of course, I have also been working hard on a grant application (see my August 5 blog for whining about this, and thank you to Richard Wright for commiserating and empathizing with me about this endeavor), and my grant writing has understandably interfered with writing my magnum bloggus on intonational meaning.
Tonight, on the eve of going away for 10 days to be in my sister's wedding, I realize that the 'uptalk' blog probably won't be making on the web anytime soon. I thought, then, that I should address an issue that came up in response to my August 5 blog, which reported on some preliminary data I have suggesting that the expression of sexual orientation through speech is constrained by word frequency and phonological neighborhood density.
In a recent E-mail, my friend, former dissertation member, and coauthor Mary Beckman correctly pointed out that my findings regarding lexical frequency and sociophonetic variation are not new. Norma Mendoza-Denton, Stef Jannedy, and Jen Hay reported similar findings in a series of research reports on the likelihood of monophthongization of the /ay/ diphthong in the speech of popular talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. Norma, Stef, and Jen acoustically analyzed digitized broadcasts of Oprah's syndicated talk show, and examined the extent to which she turned the /ay/ diphthong into a monophthong. Monophthongization of /ay/ is a characteristic of African-American English (AAE). Oprah's variable use of monophthongal /ay/ arguably reflects her variable use of AAE. Norma, Stef, and Jen found a number of factors that influence Oprah's diphtongization. One of the factors that influences Oprah's use of monophthongal /ay/ is word frequency. One of the reports of this study can be found at http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~jannedy/DOCS/icphs.html. A more comprehensive report can be found in the volume that Jen, Stef, and Norma edited called Probabilistic Linguistics (MIT Press, 2003). The Oprah findings are consistent with my (unpublished-as-of-yet) finding that word frequency mediates the expression of gay-lesbian-bisexual speech styles. Thank you, Mary Beckman, for pointing this out.
(Of course, my first-hand knowledge of the Oprah study comes because it was conducted during a time when Jen, Stef, Norma, and I were all working in the Ohio State phonetics lab. I remember a certain cold fall evening when Stef and Norma were analyzing the Oprah data, and I was analyzing kindersprache data, and my arm was twisted to drive to Lane Avenue Mall to get us all take-out Indian food. I'm certainly not complaining. The Indian food take-out counter at Lane Avenue mall was wonderful.)