Colloquium: Naomi Nagy, University of Toronto: "Internal vs. contact-induced variability: Phonetic but not phonological fidelity in Heritage Italian VOT"

Internal vs. contact-induced variability: Phonetic but not phonological fidelity in Heritage Italian VOT

Naomi Nagy, University of Toronto

Linguistic innovation may occur as multilingual speakers faithfully replicate phonetic but not phonological patterns. When two languages in contact with each other share a phonetic feature, but differ in its phonotactic distribution, phonetic implementation and phonological distribution may thus differ across generations (defined per when a speaker’s family immigrated and their family’s language shifted from majority to minority status). This is of particular interest in the heritage language context, where sociophonetic variation has not been examined extensively (though see HLVC (http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/ngn/HLVC) results including Kang & Nagy 2016, Tse 2016, 2017). Relevant questions include:

1. Do contact-induced changes proceed differently from internal changes?
2. If the variable has an established indexical value in the homeland variety – how is this manifest in the heritage context?

We explore these issues through voice onset time (VOT) in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto. In English, aspiration preferentially applies to voiceless stops in word-initial and stressed CV(X) syllables, e.g., [ˈkho.dəd] ‘coded’, and this may operate as a contact-induced rule in Heritage Italian. In contrast, Calabrian Italian is characterized by an internal rule of voiceless stop aspiration that preferentially applies in unstressed C.CV syllables (syllables whose onset is the second member of a heterosyllabic cluster, e.g., [ˈstaŋ.kho] stanco ‘tired’ or a geminate, e.g. [ˈstak.kho] stacco ‘I disconnect’). This second variable has indexical value in the homeland:  lengthening of /t/ in Calabrian Italian, often to a duration as long as for /k/,

“seems favored in those speakers that showed a ‘local’ orientation and a positive attitude towards dialect” (Nodari 2017).

For 23 speakers (six 1st generation immigrants, nine 2nd generation, eight 3rd generation), we measured VOT and coded aspiration (auditorily) from CV(X) and C.CV contexts in Calabrese Italian (3,414 tokens). Because the data are from spontaneous speech recorded in sociolinguistic interviews (Labov 1984), we also measured the duration of the following vowel for normalization purposes (to account for different speech rates).

We show that:

1. from 1st to 2nd generation, the rate of perceived-aspirated (vs. unaspirated) stops in C.CV syllables significantly decreases, while it increases in CV(X) syllables, although no acoustic difference across generations achieves significance. In fact, Heritage Italian speakers are surprisingly stable across generations.
2. On contrast, cross-generational phonetic change is apparent in C.CV syllables, where Homeland Italian indexicality is at stake.
3. The socioindexical pattern of /t/-lengthening in the C.CV context is reduced as the language is minoritized (where speakers have the more obvious choice of code as an additional indexical tool)? 

To explore inter-individual variability, we examined correlations to six measures of ethnic orientation plus speech rate and vocabulary size, two rough proxies for proficiency. None correlate to the Italian pattern (p > 0.05), while some measures show that the more one orients toward Italian identity/language, the less one adopts the contact-induced pattern. In contrast, the inherent variable (C.CV) retains its original indexical value and is not influenced by ethnic orientation or fluency.

References

Labov, W. 1984. Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In J. Baugh, & J. Scherzer (Eds.), Language in use: Readings in sociolinguistics. pp. 28–53. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

Kang, Y.-J. & N. Nagy. 2016. VOT merger in Heritage Korean in Toronto. Language Variation and Change 28.2:249-272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S095439451600003X.

Nodari, R. 2017. L'italiano degli adolescenti: Aspirazione delle occlusive sorde in Calabria e percezione della varietà locale. PhD dissertation, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

Tse. H. 2016. Contact-induced splits in Toronto Heritage Cantonese mid-vowels. Linguistica Atlantica 35.2:133-155. 

Tse, H. 2017. Variation and Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese: An analysis of two monophthongs across two generations. Asia Pacific Language Variation 2.2:124–156.