LINGUIST List 19.708: Socioling: Hamilton-Brehm: 'A Foundational Sample of El Paso ...'

LINGUIST List 19.708

Mon Mar 03 2008

Diss: Socioling: Hamilton-Brehm: 'A Foundational Sample of El Paso ...'

Editor for this issue: Evelyn Richter <evelynlinguistlist.org>

1. Anne Hamilton-Brehm, A Foundational Sample of El Paso English

Message 1: A Foundational Sample of El Paso English
Date: 03-Mar-2008
From: Anne Hamilton-Brehm <amhamibgmail.com>
Subject: A Foundational Sample of El Paso English
E-mail this message to a friend

Institution: University of Georgia Program: Linguistics Program Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2003

Author: Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm

Dissertation Title: A Foundational Sample of El Paso English

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Dissertation Director:
William A. Kretzschmar William Provost Sarah Blackwell
Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation describes the sampling method and results of analysis ofthe El Paso English Survey, a survey of lexical and phonetic features offorty European-American El Pasoans who came of age during World War II.Three-hour interviews were conducted yielding over twenty minutes ofconversational speech (the basis for phonetic analysis) and three-hundredlexical features. The informants are upper-middle-class, ten rural andthirty urban, with equal numbers of men and women in each group. Analysisinvolved Kruskall-Wallis tests for correlation of linguistic variants withthe social variables: sex, rurality, parental origin, and occupation.Results show variation both between individuals and within individualspeech, but indicate features general to the speech of the sample as awhole and features correlated with social variants. Correlation of a largenumber of linguistic variants with parental origin demonstrates theinfluence of parents on developing speech habits. Evidence from the El PasoEnglish Sample challenges the notion of merger of the vowels in caught andcot, suggesting simple unrounding of the vowel in caught. Variation in thesample is considered within the framework of the Founder Principle advancedby Salikoko Mufwene (2001).