Blog Update: Quick Book Reviews

This month (and likely the next) has been very busy, but I did find the time to finish reading up some language-related books, and I will provide some quick reviews for you here.

Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation by Sylvia Sierra. This book works from the perspective of discourse analysis, looking at how millenials use references to pop culture for different purposes - to smooth other difficult conversations; to create an in-group identity; to allow people who don't know about an event to participate anyway by reminding everyone of a shared pop-cultural heritage; to have fun; to reference stereotypes. The book is academically-focused, so it may be a difficult read if you're not familiar with discourse analysis.

One concept I found interesting was the idea of 'play frames' - that is, 'framing' a conversation in a playful way to focus on fun. Sierra references how the subjects of the study, her roommates, have different levels of willingness to engage in 'play frames.' The book also tackles the meaning of 'intertextuality', including a very funny conversation where Sierra discusses with her roommates, in a very casual matter, how intertextuality is different from mere 'references'. Overall, I found the book informative - I was not familiar with discourse analysis beforehand, so many of the concepts were new to me. If you're interested in how conversation works between millenials, and the ways in which pop culture can reinforce group identities, this book may be of interest to you.

Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language by Jennifer Coates. This book focuses on gendered differences in conversation, and specifically on examining certain well-known claims in sociolinguistics about how men and women differ in language. If you've ever heard that women are more likely to use hedges, that women are more likely to use standard forms than men, and that female conversational style is more 'collaborative' than male conversational style, which is 'competitive', then this book will be relevant to you - and likely challenge many of these preconceptions.

The book is a collection of studies. The one I found most interesting was one on the difference between teenage girls' social networks and teenage boys'. Coates is critical of the Labovian notion that women speak a more standard version of languages due to seeking 'upward prestige', and instead she suggests that a social network-based explanation does a better job of accounting for these differences. The social network study found that teenage girls had more diffuse social networks than teenage boys, who had dense social networks, and that denser social networks were correlated with having more 'regional' features. This means that women speaking a more standard version is not because they want to be seen as more middle class, but because they have less exposure to people who speak these variants, and less identification with them.

Ace Linguist Interview on BBC Oxfordshire

I got the chance to be interviewed by Tom of BBC Oxford a week ago, and I wanted to share the conversation with you all! The topic at hand is mondegreens, or misheard lyrics. We share some of our favorite misheard lyrics and discuss why this happens.

Part one and part two available here.

Interview originally hosted at BBC radio Oxford

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"Thees is love" and short 'i' lengthening

This is such a micro music linguistic trend that I have a hard time justifying writing about it, but I've now heard it from several different artists and feel compelled to include it here.

It's simple: take a word with a short i [I] sound, like 'bit'. Now replace that vowel with a long 'ee' sound [i], so it sounds like 'beat'. You don't have to go all the way to the [i] sound - you can be somewhere in between - but the end result sounds more like the long 'ee' than the short 'ih'.

The scant handful of examples:

• Florence and the Machine. What kind of man loves like th[i]s?
• Adele. Chasing Tables. "Th[i]s is love."
• Natalia Kills. Television. "We'll never go to heaven but who needs to when you l[i]ve this good."

I had originally included these in my article on Indie Voice, but after some feedback, I decided to remove them since my examples leaned more towards pop and pop-indie, and I couldn't really say I'd heard them enough to justify calling it part of the Indie Voice cluster. But if it's not indie voice, what is it?

I have so few examples that coming up with any serious explanation isn't likely, but we can speculate. My immediate thought is that lengthening and raising the vowel in 'BIT' is something that many speakers of foreign languages do, because they don't have a short 'ih' vowel and the closest available one to them is 'ee'. It's common for Spanish speakers to confuse 'ship' and 'sheep'.

Singers can be influenced by singers with other accents, including singers who speak English as a second language. Marina Diamandis is one such example who sounds like she's imitating Greek or Spanish speakers. I also hypothesized that influence from jazz and bossa nova was part of the Indie Voice sound. If you want to use the fancy terms, these pronunciations are "linguistic resources" that singers can draw from when singing. Imagine listening to someone who speaks differently from you, hearing a pronunciation you find cool, and going "I'm gonna save that for later..." and putting it in a sort of phonetic palette. (hat tip to Lisa Jansen for introducing me to the "linguistic resource" concept in her book on pop and rock pronunciation.)

Now, here's the thing that's bugging me... the ship-sheep confusion isn't considered cool by most people. It's one of the most obvious signs that you have a foreign accent, and it's one of the thing second-language speakers of English focus on when trying to reduce their accent. On the flipside, it's one of the features that comedians like to exaggerate when mimicking a foreign accent. A quick example comes from the song "Illegal Alien" by Genesis, where Phil Collins attempts to imitate a Mexican accent:

• "With a bottle of Tequila, and a new pack of c[i]garettes." - Illegal Alien, Genesis

One day, I'll do a little mini-dissection on "Illegal Alien," because wow does this song have some interesting ideas on what Spanish English sound like that. But I hope this gets the point across that this feature is ripe for mimicry and caricature.

Listening to Florence and Adele and Natalia, I don't really think they sound or want to sound foreign. In the words with the 'ih'-lengthening, the actual musical duration is also longer than the surrounding word. "What kind of man loves like thiiiiis?" "Thiiiiiis is love." "We'll never go to heaven but who needs to when you liiiive this good." Could it be easier to sing it by raising the vowel? This would be in contrast to the pop pronunciations of HAPPY with a short 'ih' at the end and HAPPY with an 'ey' sound at the end - singers claim that 'ih' and 'ey', which are lower in the mouth, are easier to sing than the 'ee' they replace.

Could be a slip of the tongue, but Florence repeats this pronunciation in every instance of her chorus, so that's a whole lot of slips of the tongue that made it to the final cut.

If imitation is out, and there's no clear phonetic or musical motivation, then we're left with the fuzziest reason of all - aesthetics. Is there some kind of aesthetic linked to pronouncing 'this' as 'thees' that has nothing to do with foreign speakers of English? The fact that these pronunciations only show up at certain parts of the song, instead of replacing every 'ih' throughout, suggests that they're sort of special. It could be a type of marking, bringing attention to these syllables by breaking our expectations of which vowel 'belongs' there.

This is still all speculation, but sometimes that's the fun stuff. Do you have any other examples like this, from other genres? What do you think is motivating this pronunciation?