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This sounds like a very categorical claim. It seems hard to measure, quantize and produce rigorous and replicable results.

crazygringo 4y ago
What seems so hard? It sounds pretty trivial to me -- all you're doing is recording samples of people's speech and objectively identifying pronunciation patterns. And it's pretty easy to do before/after with the same people at differing ages (e.g. 15 vs 20) or life stages (e.g. pre-university, university, post-university) to watch change over time. Time-consuming for sure. But not even remotely difficult in terms of rigor or replicability. And if you're familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, you'll see that pronunciation is something that can be analyzed extremely objectively.
lvxferre 4y ago
>This sounds like a very categorical claim. The claim is explicitly non-categorical, as the usage of the word "tend" shows. >It seems hard to measure, quantize and produce rigorous and replicable results. Not really. First you split your informers into groups, based on sex, social class and/or education level. Then you pick a linguistic variation that you know to be stigmatised, but still present in that group regardless. Then you analyse the frequency that that feature appears, in comparison with another variation for the same feature. If I recall correctly one of the first to notice those gender discrepancies in speech was Labov, so you might have some luck if you websearch "gender paradox Labov".
- geoduck14 4y ago
  I took a linguistics class years ago that talked about this! The hypothesis was that upper class women pronounced the "r" as in "Fourth", but lower class women "rolled the r" so "Fourth" became "fowth". The researchers entered department stores with high and low end customers and asked for a product that was "on the Fourth floor", then they counted the number of times the "r" was pronounced or "rolled"
  - lvxferre 4y ago
    I know which study you're talking about. I don't recall if Labov addressed gender differences in that specific study but, if he did: in that situation, lower class men would be even less likely to use the rhotic (with /ɹ/) pronunciation than lower class women, and prefer the non-rhotic (without /ɹ/) one instead.

crazygringo 4y ago

What seems so hard? It sounds pretty trivial to me -- all you're doing is recording samples of people's speech and objectively identifying pronunciation patterns. And it's pretty easy to do before/after with the same people at differing ages (e.g. 15 vs 20) or life stages (e.g. pre-university, university, post-university) to watch change over time. Time-consuming for sure. But not even remotely difficult in terms of rigor or replicability. And if you're familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, you'll see that pronunciation is something that can be analyzed extremely objectively.

lvxferre 4y ago

>This sounds like a very categorical claim. The claim is explicitly non-categorical, as the usage of the word "tend" shows. >It seems hard to measure, quantize and produce rigorous and replicable results. Not really. First you split your informers into groups, based on sex, social class and/or education level. Then you pick a linguistic variation that you know to be stigmatised, but still present in that group regardless. Then you analyse the frequency that that feature appears, in comparison with another variation for the same feature. If I recall correctly one of the first to notice those gender discrepancies in speech was Labov, so you might have some luck if you websearch "gender paradox Labov".

geoduck14 4y ago
I took a linguistics class years ago that talked about this! The hypothesis was that upper class women pronounced the "r" as in "Fourth", but lower class women "rolled the r" so "Fourth" became "fowth". The researchers entered department stores with high and low end customers and asked for a product that was "on the Fourth floor", then they counted the number of times the "r" was pronounced or "rolled"
- lvxferre 4y ago
  I know which study you're talking about. I don't recall if Labov addressed gender differences in that specific study but, if he did: in that situation, lower class men would be even less likely to use the rhotic (with /ɹ/) pronunciation than lower class women, and prefer the non-rhotic (without /ɹ/) one instead.