Early stages of change, as nuclei become more centralized, show
high positive skewness. The large majority of the positive outliers are
simple monosyllables which can accept heavy stress; negative outliers
concentrate words with one or more following syllables, which shorten the
nucleus and lead to an undershoot of the target. Such distributions reverse
the normal expectation for vowels with peripheral targets. For dialects
with more advanced changes, skewing falls in a linear fashion, with a -.81
correlation of mean F2 and skewness. This linear progression gives way to a
curvilinear pattern in the most developed change, the fronting of free
/uw/, where for the most advanced dialects, the South and Mid-Atlantic
States, skewness regresses towards zero. Maximal regression coefficients
for age are found in early and middle stages of change; as skewness reaches
its maximum negative value, such age coefficients disappear.
The retardation and termination of these changes are not the result
of structural or phonetic limits, but appears to represent the decline of
social evaluation. The skewing progression is interpreted to support the
hypothesis that in the early stages of change, social evaluation is focused
on heavily stressed outliers which exceed the mean target; as change
progresses, the focus shifts to the mean or expected value, while outliers
are primarily nuclei with insufficient duration to reach the target.
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About the PLC23 Committee
Previously held Penn Linguistics Colloquium: PLC22 (1998), PLC21 (1997)
Penn Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania