Annual Linguistics Program Homecoming Lecture

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Shifting Accents & Evolving Competence: What Second Dialect Acquisition Reveals About the (Socio)linguistic System
Lecturer: Jennifer Nycz. Linguistics Department, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Thursday, October 27, 2016, Dartmouth Hall, room 102, 4:30 pm

People often change the way they speak after moving to and living in a new region. Casual observers may say that these speakers have ‘acquired an accent’, but accents are not adopted or avoided monolithically: geographically mobile speakers alter specific dialect or accent features depending on a range of linguistic, social, and developmental factors (e.g. Payne 1980; Chambers 1992; Kerswill 1996; Hazen 2001; Sankoff 2004; Evans and Iverson 2007; Nycz 2013).  Patterns of accent change over the lifespan thus provide a rich empirical basis for understanding the nature and development of communicative competence (Hymes 1972). Studies of the structural constraints on new dialect acquisition reveal how linguistic competence may change with exposure to new input, and can help us develop better theories about the representations and processes underlying these changes. Investigating how these new forms are used in interaction, meanwhile, can shed light on the development of social competence, and the extent to which individuals learn and use new socio-indexical links in adulthood.

In this talk I argue that both linguistic and social competence are more malleable through the life span than previously thought, drawing on some of my research about accent change among native speakers of Canadian English living in the New York City region. In the first part of the talk I explain how lexically and phonetically gradient patterns of accent shift indicate the crucial roles of both detailed, episodic exemplars and more abstract phonemic categories in dialect change. In the second part of the talk I describe patterns of topic-based variation among my mobile speakers, and what these patterns tell us about the development of new socio-indexical links over the lifespan and how these are represented in the mind.

This event is free and open to the public.