2020/10/01 by Anja Thiel, Aaron J. Dinkin · 23 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Multilingual Education and Policy #Trap (plumbing) #Raising (metalworking) #Feature (linguistics) #Style (visual arts) #Reading (process) #History #Political science #Geography #Linguistics
paper · doi:10.1017/s0954394520000137
published in Language Variation and Change 32(3), 373-398 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2020/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/12
Abstract We examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap -raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap —a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raise trap more in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raising trap between 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.