The social motivations of reversal: Raisedboughtin New York City English

2014/08/13 by Kara Becker · 45 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Multilingual Education and Policy #Indexicality #White (mutation) #Meaning (existential) #Sociology #Ethnic group #Persona #Ideology #Sociolinguistics #Linguistics #History #Media studies #Gender studies #Psychology #Art #Politics #Anthropology #Humanities #Political science #Law #Philosophy

paper · doi:10.1017/s0047404514000372

published in Language in Society 43(4), 395-420 (Cambridge University Press)

openalex publication_date 2014/08/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/18

Abstract

Abstract This article presents a variationist analysis of the bought vowel in New York City English (NYCE) and finds that it has reversed the trajectory of change outlined in Labov (1966). An acoustic analysis of production data from sixty-four native residents of the Lower East Side demonstrates that bought is lowering in apparent time, a change led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the middle classes. A second source of data comes from perceptions of raised bought gathered from a matched guise experiment, which highlights an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of social meanings for raised bought that comprise a ‘classic New Yorker’ persona: an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Taken together, the data suggest that bought 's reversal is motivated by its contemporary social meanings. ( bought, New York City English, dialectology, variationism, sound change, social meaning, perception, sociophonetics)*

Citations

• The Social Motivation of a Sound Change
• /r/ and the construction of place identity on New York City's Lower East Side1
• Transmission and diffusion
• The nature of sociolinguistic perception
• The place of New York city in American linguistic geography
• One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia: Linear Incrementation, Reversal, and Reanalysis
• The sociolinguistic variant as a carrier of social meaning
• Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British English of Norwich
• Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation
• Variation and the indexical field1
• Pronunciation in Downstate New York (I)

Cited by

• Escaping theTrap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time
• New York City English [wikipedia]

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• One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia: Linear Incrementation, Reversal, and Reanalysis