Pulling Out All the Stops: Referee Design and Phonetic Correlates of Gay Men’s English
Keywords:
style shifting, intraspeaker variation, sociophonetics
Abstract
Studies of intraspeaker variation and the linguistic indexing of sexual identity have formed an important part of recent research in variationist sociolinguistics. This study investigates patterns of word-final stop release in the speech of a flamboyantly gay television host, Graham Norton. The results indicate a significant correlation between the rate of released word-final stops and the sexual orientation of an absent referee, as defined by Bell (1984, 2001), with a higher proportion of released stops for gay-identified referees. We argue that this pattern demonstrates the linguistic indexing of an ingroup identity, which Norton shares with referees who identify as gay. In this way, the variable of word-final stop release can be considered a ‘building block’ (Barrett 2002:33) in the construction of Norton's sexual identity.
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Ashburn, Karyn. 2000. Mainstream Perceptions of SF [Science Fiction]. Panel discussion at Minicon 35, Minneapolis.
Audacity Team. 2013. Audacity 2.0.5. Accessed 16 October 2013, URL http://audacity.sourceforge.net.
Austin, John. 1979. Performative utterances. In Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. Warnock, 233–253. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barrett, Rusty. 2002. Is queer theory important for sociolinguistic theory? In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts, and A. Wong, 25–43. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker, and Steven Walker. 2013. lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Lmer. R Package version 1.0-5. Accessed 16 October 2013, URL htttp://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4.
Bell, Alan. 1984. Language style as audience design. In Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook, ed. N. Coupland and A. Jaworski, 1997, 240–50. New York: St Mattin’s Press Inc.
Bell, Alan. 2001. Back in style: Reworking audience design. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford, 139–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benor, Sarah Bunin. 2001. The learned /t/: Phonological variation in Orthodox Jewish English. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 7, ed. E. Kaiser, D. E. Johnson, I. Ross, T. Sanchez, and A. Williams, 1–16.
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2013. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. Version 5.3.56 [Computer software]. Accessed 16 October 2013, URL http://www.praat.org/.
Bucholtz, Mary. 2008. Whiteness of nerds: Superstandard English and racial markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11:84–100.
Crist, Sean. 1997. Duration of onset consonants in gay male stereotyped speech. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4, ed. A. Dimitriadis, H. Lee, L. Siegel, C. Surek-Clark, and A. Williams, 53–70.
Gaudio, Rudolf P. 1994. Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69:30–57.
Hay, Jennifer, Stefanie Jannedy, and Norma Mendoza-Denton. 2010. Oprah and /ay/: Lexical frequency, referee design and style. In The Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader, ed. M. Meyerhoff and E. Schleef, 53–59. London: Routledge.
Hickey, Raymond. 1984. Coronal segments in Irish English. Journal of Linguistics 20:233–250.
Hoover, Marcus. 2013. IMDb: Openly gay actors — a list by Marcus Hoover. Accessed 7 October 2013, URL http://www.imdb.com/list/ClwkBTwU5ZQ/.
Immediate Media Company Ltd. 2013. Who do you think you are? Graham Norton. Accessed 6 December 2013, URL http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/episode/graham-norton.
Ingalls, Matt. 2012. Soundflower 1.6.2. Cycling ‘74.
Jacobs, Greg, Henry Rogers, and Ron Smyth. 1999. Sounding gay, sounding straight: A search for phonetic correlates. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 28, Toronto.
Kiesling, Scott F. 2002. Playing the straight man: Displaying and maintaining male heterosexuality in discourse. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts, and A. Wong, 249–266. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Labov, William. 1972. The social stratification of (r) in New York department stores. In Sociolinguistic Patterns, ed. W. Labov, 168–178. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lakoff, Robin T. 1990. Talking Power: The Politics of Language in our Lives. New York: Basic.
Lavalie, John. 2012. The Graham Norton Show (Guest Stars & Air Dates Guide). Accessed 7 October 2013, URL http://epguides.com/GrahamNortonShow/.
Leap, William. 2002. Not entirely in support of a queer linguistics. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts, and A. Wong, 45–63. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 1983. Intonation in a man’s world. In Language, Gender and Society, ed. B. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and N. Henley, 69–88. Rowley, MA: Newbury.
Podesva, Robert J. 2008. Three sources of stylistic meaning. In Texas Linguistic Forum 51 (Proceedings of the Symposium About Language and Society — Austen 15), ed. K. Shaw, S. Wagner, and E. Yasui, 1–10.
Podesva, Robert J., Sarah J. Roberts, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. 2002. Sharing resources and indexing meaning in the production of gay styles. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts, and A. Wong, 175–190. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
R Core Team. 2013. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Accessed 16 October 2013, URL http://www.r-project.org.
Rogers, Henry, Ron Smyth, and Greg Jacobs. 2000. Vowel shift and sibilant duration in gay- and straight-sounding male speech. Paper presented at The International Gender and Language Association Conference 1, Stanford.
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 2002. Investigating stylistic variation. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, and N. Schilling-Estes, 375–401. Malden: Blackwell.
Smyth, Ron, and Henry Rogers. 2008. Do gay-sounding men speak like women? Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 27, ed. S. Cummins, B. Jankowski, and P. Shaw, 129–144.
The Graham Norton Show. 2008. [Television programme, online, BBC2.] Accessed 16 October 2013, URL http://bobnational.net/record/4824.
Wong, Andrew, Sarah J. Roberts, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. 2002. Speaking of Sex. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, ed. K. Campbell-Kibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts, and A. Wong, 1–21. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Zimman, Lal. 2010. Female-to-male transsexuals and gay-sounding voices: A pilot study. Colorado Research in Linguistics 22. Accessed 16 October 2013, URL http://www.colorado.edu/ling/CRIL/Volume22_Issue1/.
Published
03-Mar-2015
How to Cite
Dickson, V., and Y. Turner. “Pulling Out All the Stops: Referee Design and Phonetic Correlates of Gay Men’s English”. Lifespans and Styles, Vol. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 3-11, doi:10.2218/ls.v1i0.2015.1178.
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