Official Program for NARNiHS 2023
Fifth Annual Meeting
North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics
A Sister Society of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
This year again fully online via video-conference!
==> Attendance is free with NARNiHS membership!
And NARNiHS membership is free!
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Video-conference access will be e-mailed to NARNiHS members prior to the conference.
==> download the official NARNiHS 2023 program as PDF
Times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time (New York) with additional indication of Pacific Time (Vancouver), Central European Time (Berlin), and Moscow Standard time (Moscow) for reference.
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Friday, 6 January 2023
Session 1: Methodological approaches in historical sociolinguistics
Time: 11:00–13:00 (New York) — 8:00-10:00 (Vancouver) | 17:00-19:00 (Berlin) | 19:00-21:00 (Moscow)
Chair: Kelly Elizabeth Wright (Virginia Polytechnic University, USA)
| 11:00 08:00 17:00 19:00 |
Challenges to the Study of Variation in Colonial Poqom (Mayan).
James Tandy (University of Texas at Austin, USA).Colonial documents in Poqom Mayan reveal variation across space and time. These manuscripts represent the oldest available documentation of Poqom; however, they are almost exclusively doctrinal works by Spanish priests, and thus only indirectly reflect native speaker usage. This talk discusses potential solutions to these interpretive challenges, as well as new research questions that arise when using an L2 corpus. As part of the talk, I give a case study of dialectal variation in person and aspect morphology in Colonial Poqom. Finally, I outline a plan for constructing a full searchable corpus of Colonial Poqom. |
| 11:30 08:30 17:30 19:30 |
Tracing the sociolinguistic history of Ecuadoran Media Lengua: facts & models, old & new.
John Lipski (Pennsylvania State University, USA).The Ecuadoran mixed language Media Lengua consists of Kichwa morphosyntax, including all system morphemes and syntactic structures, while all lexical roots are derived from Spanish. Dating the chronology and spread of ML is hampered by conflicting and confusing oral testimony as to the speech of previous generations. Incorporating field data from previously undocumented ML communities and combining an analysis of ML variants and sociolinguistic interviews, the spread of ML to widely separated geographical areas receives a plausible explanation, while lending support to the proposal by Thomason (2003) that the only stable mixed languages are those spoken outside of their original bilingual context. |
| 12:00 09:00 18:00 20:00 |
Cinderella comes late to the ball: folklore collection and minoritised languages in the long 19th century.
Oliver Currie (Univerza v Ljubljani, Slovenia).While minoritised languages in multilingual nation states had a subordinate sociolinguistic status, in folklore this status was reversed, as minoritised (peasant) cultures were considered to have better preserved folklore than the educated elite. However, folktales collected from minoritised cultures were often (though not exclusively) published only in translation in the hegemonic languages (e.g. Irish folktales in English; Breton, Corsican or Gascon folktales in French). Focusing on 19th century folklore collection in the UK and France, this paper explores what factors may have influenced the language of publication and what the language question in folklore collection reveals about the sociolinguistic context. |
| 12:30 09:30 18:30 20:30 |
“Fertile ground” for the actuation of sound change in historical sociophonetic data.
Christopher Strelluf ; Matthew J. Gordon (University of Warwick, England ; University of Missouri, USA).This project seeks the historical actuation of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) in Missouri. We use archival recordings of Missourians born between 1884 and 1938 to acoustically analyze vowels involved in these chain shifts. While we do not find modern-day instantiations of either the NCS or LBMS, we find vowel qualities that anticipate these chain shifts in St. Louis and Kansas City. We propose that historical vowel qualities made these communities “fertile ground” for participating in these chain shifts, and suggest the concept of “fertile ground” as a resource for understanding the actuation of sound changes. |
Saturday, 7 January 2023
Session 2: Working with features in historical sociolinguistics
Time: 11:00–12:30 (New York) — 8:00-9:30 (Vancouver) | 17:00-18:30 (Berlin) | 19:00-20:30 (Moscow)
Chair: Nandi Sims (Stanford University, USA)
| 11:00 08:00 17:00 19:00 |
Putting It All Together: Sociopolitical Interactions and the Distribution of Linguistic Variables in Mayan Writing.
David F. Mora-Marín (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA).The paper presents a quantitative analysis of several grapholinguistic (graphic, graphemic, orthographic, linguistic) variables in Epigraphic Mayan, based on a dataset compiled by means of the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991-2022). Due to the difficulty of identifying ancient scribes and their sociodemographic traits (age, gender, status, etc), the paper studies the distribution of variables in connection with evidence of inter-polity interactions across the Maya lowlands. The preliminary results point to statistically significant tendencies for certain variables to occur in texts with statements of diplomacy, and others to occur with statements of conflict and subordination. |
| 11:30 08:30 17:30 19:30 |
The Social and Historical Development of Leísmo in Spanish: A Variationist Analysis.
Jamelyn Wheeler (Indiana University, USA).The current study provides a diachronic, variationist analysis of leísmo, or the use of the [dative] clitic pronoun le(s) in place of [accusative] lo(s) or la(s) to refer to direct complements, in Peninsular Spanish. It accounts for variation in clitic selection (le(s) vs. lo(s)/la(s)) in works of fiction from three centuries in the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE). The results of mixed-effects models indicate that linguistic and social factors are significant in predicting le(s), and the phenomenon is preferred in dialogue spoken by male characters, in works from northern-central Spain and in more recent time periods. |
| 12:00 09:00 18:00 20:00 |
You have no right! The dynamics of power in Colonial Louisiana Spanish.
Jeremy King (Louisiana State University, USA).The current study examines the dynamics of power between government officials in Colonial Spanish Louisiana. The corpus consists of 200 business letters stemming from three different settlements of the territory. The linguistic focus is the commissive and directive speech acts noted in the corpus; several categories of linguistic forms are noted for their conformity to, or deviation from, accepted norms of the time. Results reveal that the type and quantity of mitigation devices employed typically correlated with the level of institutional power held by the writer; writers’ breaking with politic behavior often signals a challenge to power norms. |
Break
Time: 12:30–13:00 (New York) — 9:30-10:00 (Vancouver) | 18:30-19:00 (Berlin) | 20:30-21:00 (Moscow)
NARNiHS General Meeting (open to all)
Time: 13:00–14:00 (New York) — 10:00-11:00 (Vancouver) | 19:00-20:00 (Berlin) | 21:00-22:00 (Moscow)
Chair: Sandrine Tailleur (Université du Quebec à Chicoutimi, Canada)
Note that this meeting is planned for one hour.