LINGUIST List 34.366
Mon Jan 30 2023
Review: Sociolinguistics: Jansen (2022)
Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillenlinguistlist.org>
Date: 25-Oct-2022
From: Karen Duchaj <k-duchaj
neiu.edu>
Subject: English Rock and Pop Performances
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AUTHOR: Lisa Jansen
TITLE: English Rock and Pop Performances
SUBTITLE: A sociolinguistic investigation of British and American language perceptions and attitudes
SERIES TITLE: IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 51
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2022
REVIEWER: Karen Duchaj, Northeastern Illinois University
SUMMARY
“Why do you think the artist is from X?” (p. 53)
With this deceptively simple question frame and a few others like it, Jansen, in the study examined in this book, explores in detail the perceptual behavior of listeners in regards to British vs. American pop and rock singing.
The study described in this book seeks to remedy the relative dearth of work on perceptual dialectology in the realm of pop/rock singing accents. The book, which grew out of the author’s doctoral dissertation, focuses on a qualitative examination of the audience’s perceptions in response to American and British dialects in rock and pop songs. The intended readership would be scholars in sociolinguistic performance studies and sociolinguistics in general, including graduate students.
Beginning with Trudgill’s (1983) seminal study on British bands employing American dialect features in their singing, studies of singing accents have focused on phonological, lexical, and sometimes syntactic features as measured and quantified by the researcher. The book under review takes the perspective of the music’s audience and the listeners’ assessments and associations with the singer’s perceived accent features.
The book is divided into eight chapters: the first three provide an introduction and justification for examining the audience response to singing dialects, including squarely placing this work among its predecessors. The next four chapters deal directly with the study itself: its method, data, analysis, and discussion. The final chapter brings conclusions and projections for future work.
In addition to the eight chapters and references, the book contains two appendices: one with the orthographic and phonetic transcription of each song and the other with the fully detailed codebook created to collect and organize the interviewees’ data.
Chapter 1 (Introduction) provides an overall view of the content of the book and justifies its addition to language performance scholarship.
In Chapter 2 (Language performances as an object of sociolinguistic investigation), the author (re-)acquaints the reader with scholarship in the arena of sociolinguistic examinations of language performance, carefully laying out the progression from traditional studies of the vernacular to those of deliberate performances for others. She notes both the relevance of pop culture to this field and its relationship to indexing and indexical fields (Eckert 2008).
Chapter 3 (Singing as language performance) hones in on the specific act of singing as language performance. As noted, Trudgill (1983) was one of the first to seriously study the use of phonetic variables in the singing of British rock and pop artists, followed by Simpson (1999), Carlsson (2001), Beal (2009), Konert-Panek (2017), and others. The author explains clearly how such studies have advanced our understanding of British (and American) singers and their performance of accent features in song and the motivations for the choices they make/made. It is in this chapter that the author makes the argument that the perception by the listeners of the pronunciations employed is a critical piece of the puzzle and one that merits study. She goes on to lay out four research questions for the study at hand. The questions are thus: (1) Are typical American and/or British phonetic features actually recognized as American or British by the participants [in the study]? (2) Which other features (linguistic and non-linguistic) prompt a response and affect listeners’ evaluations? (3) How do British and American listeners’ perceptions of the same stimuli differ? and (4) How do British and American listeners evaluate artists’ language behavior?
Chapter 4 (Qualitative data and analysis) acquaints the reader with the study at hand. The interviewees consisted of fifty participants, most of them college and graduate students in their twenties, half of them British and half American, who were asked to listen separately to eight different songs released between 2011 and 2013. The songs were divided equally by genre, pop vs. rock, and by national origin of the band/artist, British or American. With the qualitative study approach, the results sought were not simply how many listeners rated each song as British(ized) or American(ized), but rather a deep understanding of how they arrived at their conclusions and what factors were relevant in making their decisions. A detailed coding system, as well as direct transcription of comments, was developed and employed by the researcher. It is in this chapter that Jansen makes the suggestion, in order to be more detailed about indexical fields, to specify in this work the intentional field on the production side and the associative field on the perception side.
Chapter 5 (Results I: Perception of stimuli) reveals to the reader how the interviewees in the study interpreted what they heard in each song regarding its national origin and purported dialect. The author guides the reader through each of the eight songs tested and the overall ratings of the participants: American, British, Americanized British, Britishized American, Australian/New Zealand, or Undecided. Each song section is accompanied by detailed explanation and clear color graphs. The chapter ends with an interim summary of how the stimuli were perceived.
Chapter 6 (Results II: The discussion phase) then takes the reader much further in understanding why the interviewees made the decisions they did about specific songs and artists. The value of such a qualitative study report is that the reader can see for him/herself, in the interviewees’ own words, what (sometimes contradictory) factors influenced them. Jansen maps out, in this chapter, associative fields connected, among these participants, to an American(ized) singing style and a “going local” (local British) style of dialect in singing, showing how American accents, associated with the global commercialism of the pop genre, index monetary success but also inauthenticity. On the contrary, the use of local British dialects indexes, particularly for British listeners, a level of integrity and authenticity, even if it means less success for the artist commercially.
Chapter 7 (Discussion) is Jansen’s discussion chapter, in which she revisits her four research questions laid out in Chapter 3 and refers to her results in order to answer those questions. Graphs are included to visually support her arguments.
Chapter 8 (Concluding remarks) reviews the study and its findings and suggests future study in this field.
EVALUATION
I like nearly everything about this book, and it will make a valuable addition to my own bookshelf. I would even call it a “must-have” for scholars in the area of singing performance. Jansen’s writing style is clear and well-organized, such that it is pleasantly unlikely for a reader to lose the thread of her arguments, and the visuals provided are valuable complements to the text. Her descriptions and transcriptions of the subject interviews are detailed enough that a reader can almost picture the process of the study and hear the subjects giving their input on the singers’ dialects. The insight and conclusions are satisfying and thought-provoking. That said, a few questions do arise. It seems, for example, that the familiarity of more than half of the interviewees, as they admitted to the researcher, with the voice and music of Taylor Swift (the artist of one of the eight songs used) may have been an unnecessary interference in their objective assessment of dialect. It is, of course, impossible for a researcher to know ahead of time which bands/artists/songs will be familiar to test subjects, but it seems that the data would be overall more uniform if songs were likely to be evenly unknown among the listeners, creating the need for the most popular artists to be rejected as stimuli. Another possible small question is whether the age group and college identity of the subjects may skew their views in favor of indie (“authentic”) artists over the more commercially-perceived ambition of others.
In sum, I do find there to be enormous value, and, true to the author’s goal, an acknowledged gap greatly filled in here, in measuring the effects of the audience and their comments to these pop/rock stimuli. As the author implies, some of the most salient factors for accent-adjustment perceived by these interviewed subjects, e.g. financial success, barely registered in many previous studies’ conclusions or were overlooked as trivial. Overall, while it is probably too specific to be used as a course textbook, this is a book that is needed and will almost certainly be referred to frequently in the future of singing performance studies.
REFERENCES
Beal, Joan C. 2009. “You’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham”: Dialect and identity in British Indie music. Journal of English Linguistics 37(3). 223-240.
Carlsson, Carl Johan. 2001. The way they sing it: Englishness and pronunciation in English pop and rock. Moderna Språk 95(2). 161-168.
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4). 453-476.
Konert-Panek, Monika. 2017. Overshooting Americanisation: Accent stylization in pop singing – acoustic properties of the BATH and TRAP vowels in focus. Research in Language 15(4). 371-384.
Simpson, Paul. 1999. Language, culture and identity: With (another) look at accents in pop and rock singing. Multilingua 18(4). 343-367.
Trudgill, Peter. 1983. On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Karen Duchaj is a faculty member in the linguistics department of Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Her recent research interests focus on the language of the Beatles, including Lennon’s consonant substitutions, Lennon and McCartney’s r-pronunciation in solo work, Harrison’s vowel alternation in his singing dialects, Lennon’s performed singing pronunciation indexing social characteristics, and Lennon/McCartney’s stressed syllables in naming.
Page Updated: 30-Jan-2023