Oh Hey There

implicature:

An brief linguistic analysis of the word “hella,” written by Rachelle Waksler of San Francisco State University. Needs work, but it’s better than nothing.

Specifiers are things like very, quite, rather, pretty and kinda in adverbial/adjectival phrases. In noun phrases, they are determiners or quantifiers such as the, some, every, no and apostrophe-ess genitives like Tristan’s or my dog’s. As functional words, they tend to be a pretty restricted class of words when it comes to language changes, so a new specifier is hella cool.

(Source: misworded)

loscheiner:

Parallelbotany (my neighbor from back in northern Manhattan) wanted to know how to make voice recordings so that she could share her Oregonian with the tumblrverse.  

I’m sure there are tons of voice recording softwares available.  I always use PRAAT because you can record and edit sound files easily.  Also, it’s free, so click through to download it (for either pc or mac).

To record a file you click “new” and start talking. To save click “write” and save the file as .wav.  Open the file in iTunes and under “Advanced” you can convert it to .mp3. Then, it’s tumblr-ready.  Easy peasy.

Funny I was using Praat today to record and analyze myself saying sentences with ”our” and “are”.

Someone replied to lolo’s post asking if there are any standardized texts to determine accent. Yes, please call Stella. Not that recording this passage will tell you anything in particular.

The best way I know to pin down your dialect is to go through Wikipedia and look at the features listed on each dialect page. Which sucks, because the features can be weird unsourced and obviously anecdotal things and because you probably need a linguist to explain some of the features in plain English. (Which I can do btw.)

via azspot:

It was a bit of a shock, losing all expectations. For years—all my life, really—parents, teachers, and guidance counselors had told me that if I went to a good college and did well, I would be able to find a job after graduation that would, with a little ladder-climbing, keep me comfortable and financially secure. After I graduated in May 2009, in political science, I moved back home to St. Louis to start my career, but there simply were no jobs to be found.

Over several months, I sent out more than 500 résumés for all sorts of jobs all over the country, but I got only two interviews and no offers.

I couldn’t find a job, but neither could anyone I knew. Now, more than a year after graduation, most of my college friends still live at home, and many of those who have moved out are borrowing money from their parents to eat and pay rent. A few have internships, but most of those are unpaid, and few are likely to lead to jobs. Two friends who studied psychology for four years now work off the books at a sandwich shop. Another, who got her master’s in development studies from Cambridge, became a barista at Starbucks.

Some are applying to grad school just to have something to do, but the prospect of racking up thousands more dollars in student debt is crushing. The rest are still looking, sending out résumés, going to career fairs, volunteering for experience, and networking. Some have given up. We are a whole generation graduating into a job market that has no room for us.

So I moved to India.

i was too busy commiserating with the piece to see that “punchline” coming, and when i did, i panted OH MY GAWD out loud. ugh. i guess i should start looking into communicative disorders programs if i want some secure and meaningful work with linguistics.

They are of course against the horrible initiative that says that teachers with “heavily accented” English are to be removed. These are their main facts; (7) and (8) are my favorite points:

1. ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2. Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3. Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
4. Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5. It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
6. There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7. Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8. There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.

They later elaborate on (7), and it’s pretty interesting:

Evidence exists that listeners’ perceptions of ‘foreign accented speech’ are often inaccurate – listeners’ predisposed to view a speaker has having a ‘foreign’ identity are likely to perceive that person’s speech as accented, even when it is not (Rubin, 1992; Derwing and Monroe 2009). Nancy Niedzielski’s (1996, 1999) work shows that people think the same sounds are [more ‘standard’ or less ‘standard’] depending on whether they are told the speaker is from Canada vs. right over the border in Detroit (participants, of course, viewed their own dialect as ‘standard’). In Rubin’s work, these beliefs lead to lower comprehension scores for listeners who think that they are listening to ‘foreign accented speech’ (even when they are not). To the extent that policies like this further stigmatize foreign accented speech, therefore, they are counterproductive to learning.