CFP (AAA 2012) Voices in movement: Phonetic border crossings

[Lal Zimman]

Dear colleagues,

Below is a call for abstracts for a panel on the relationship between borders and the voice at the 2012 AAA meetings. Please circulate it as you see fit!

Apologies for any cross-posting.

With thanks,
Lal Zimman


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Call for papers:

2012 Meeting of the AAA, San Francisco
November 14-18, 2012


VOICES IN MOVEMENT: PHONETIC BORDER CROSSINGS

Organizer: Lal Zimman (University of Colorado, Boulder)


Abstracts are invited for a panel on the role of the voice in the linguistic negotiation of borders and crossings. 

The acoustic characteristics of the voice, though highly salient carriers of social meaning, remain to a large extent the domain of sociolinguistics rather than linguistic anthropology. By bringing anthropological concerns about literal and figurative borders together with methods and questions developed in the burgeoning field of sociophonetics (see Hay & Drager 2007), the goal of this panel is to encourage sociocultural linguists to cross, blur, and redefine the boundaries that separate qualitative and quantitative branches of our fields.  With a focus on speakers traversing social, linguistic, or spatial borders, papers are invited to showcase the ways the voice itself can enable, prohibit, (de)authenticate, (de)naturalize, or (de)legitimize border crossings (cf. Bucholtz & Hall 2005). 

Sociophonetics has much to add to interdisciplinary conversations about social and/or linguistic borderlands. For instance, authors might investigate the ways that the voice carries traces of a speaker’s linguistic history as they move across locales or identities. We know that language varieties and speaking styles learned in early life often exert a systematic influence on an individual’s articulatory habits later on (e.g. Tagliamonte & Molfenter 2007). At the same time, researchers who have considered change in a speaker’s accent across the lifetime have shown that shifts in social context may be accompanied by significant shifts at the phonetic level (e.g. Harrington 2006; Sankoff & Blondeau 2007). In the context of socio-geographical movement, the voice therefore reflects not only a speaker’s origins, but also the destination at which they arrive. 

From another perspective, the voice is important because of the ideological weight it often takes on and because of its status as an omnipresent feature of spoken language. In metalinguistic discourse about the voice, for example, socially meaningful phonetic variation is often naturalized (particularly in arenas like gender and race, where the pull of biological essentialism is strong). The notion that the voice represents a speaker’s “natural” linguistic self makes it a powerful resource for the negotiation of borders and movement across them. 

These are only a few initial directions for this panel. Other potential topics that might be addressed include (but are not limited to):

• The voice in contexts of globalization and transnational exchange;
• The phonetics of language contact;
• How the voice enables speakers to cross the divisions between social categories (e.g. transnational and hybrid identities, transgender practices, and other transformations);
• Ideologies about voice;
• Phonetic analysis of linguistic crossing or mock languages;
• Voices in linguistic varieties with disputed borders;
• Changes in the voice through the lifetime or specific stages of life;
• Sound change in relation to social, political, or geographic borders.

Please submit abstracts of 250 words (with title) to Lal Zimman, at zimman at colorado.edu, no later than APRIL 1, 2012. 



References
Bucholtz, Mary, & Kira Hall (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4-5):585-614.

Harrington, Jonathan (2006). An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts. Journal of Phonetics 34(4):439-457.

Hay, Jennifer & Katie Drager (2007). Sociophonetics. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:89-103.

Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Sonja Molfenter (2007). How'd you get that accent?: Acquiring a second dialect of the same language. Language in Society 36(5):649-675.

Sankoff, Gillian, & Hélène Blondeau (2007). Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French. Language 83(3):560-588.