Supernanny: An Intraspeaker Study of Addressee Effects in the Speech of Jo Frost
Keywords:
style shifting, intraspeaker variation, sociophonetics, sociolinguistics, Child Directed Speech
Abstract
Limited research exists evaluating the extent to which intraspeaker style-shifting is conditioned by addressee age and addressee nationality. The current study investigated Supernanny Jo Frost’s realisations of (t) as glottal or non-glottal towards British and American adults and children. Frost was found to style-shift to child-directed speech (CDS) when addressing children, which is interpreted in terms of communication accommodation theory as a communicative strategy to enhance clarity. Frost generally avoided convergence towards her American (and British) interlocutors, such that her style-shifting was found to be conditioned less by addressee nationality than by addressee age. I argue that this avoidance of convergence was motivated by her desire to construct an authentic, authoritative identity, which she achieved through her exploitation of particular indexical meanings associated with [t] and [ʔ].
References
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Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating “self-conscious” speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27(1):53–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404598001031
Schilling, Natalie. 2013. Investigating stylistic variation. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. K. Chambers and N. Schilling, 325–349. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Shapp, Allison, Nathan LaFave, and John V. Singler. 2014. Ginsburg v. Ginsburg: A longitudinal study of regional features in a Supreme Court Justice’s speech. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2):149–158. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol20/iss2/17/
Smiljanić, Rajka, and Ann R. Bradlow. 2008. Speaking and hearing clearly: Talker and listener factors in speaking style changes. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1):236–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00112.x
Soderstrom, Melanie. (2007). Beyond babytalk: Re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants. Developmental Review 27(4):501–532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.06.002
Supernanny Fan. 2016. Supernanny The Jeans family [YouTube Video, Series 1, Episode 1, ABC]. Accessed 5 October 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0nAd_crci4
Uganda Be Kidding Me. 2014. Supernanny—The Gormley-Brickley family [YouTube Video, Series 4, Episode 2, Channel 4]. Accessed 24 September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9AL34AGzEQ
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Altendorf, Ulrike. 2003. Estuary English: Levelling at the Interface of RP and South-Eastern British English. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (Ed.). 2014. Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
Audacity Team. 2015. Audacity [Computer programme, Version 2.1.0]. Accessed 5 October 2015, http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Babel, Molly. 2010. Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English. Language in Society 39(4):437–456. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404510000400
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker, and Steve Walker. 2016. R-Forge [Computer programme, Version 1.1-12]. Accessed 19 May 2016, http://lme4.r-forge.r-project.org/
Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2):145–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/s004740450001037x
Bell, Allan. 2001. Back in style: Reworking audience design. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. P. Eckert and J. Rickford, 139–169. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613258.010
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2015. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer programme, Version 6.0.08]. Accessed 5 November 2015, http://www.praat.org/
Cameron, D. 2000. Good to Talk. London, UK: Sage. Collins, Beverley, and Inger M. Mees. 2013. Practical Phonetics and Phonology: A Resource Book for Students. London, UK: Routledge.
Coupland, Nikolas. 1985. ‘Hark, hark, the lark’: Social motivations for phonological style-shifting. Language and Communication 5(3):153–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(85)90007-2
Cruttenden, Alan. 2014. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. London, UK: Routledge.
“David Jeans”. n.d. [Wiki biography]. Accessed 21 December 2016, http://supernanny.wikia.com/wiki/David_Jeans
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field 1. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453–476. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00374.x
Eddington, David, and Michael Taylor. 2009. T-glottalization in American English. American Speech 84(3):298–314. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2009-023
Fernald, A. 2000. Speech to infants as hyperspeech: Knowledge-driven processes in early word recognition. Phonetica 57: 242–54. https://doi.org/10.1159/000028477
Foulkes, Paul, Gerard J. Docherty, and Dominic Watt. 2005. Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language 81(1):177–206. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0018
Giles, Howard, and Jessica Gasiorek. 2013. Parameters of non-accommodation: Refining and elaborating communication accommodation theory. In Social Cognition and Communication, ed. J. P. Forgas, O. Vincze, and J. László, 155–172. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Giles, Howard, Justine Coupland, and Nikolas Coupland (Eds.). 1991. Contexts of Accommodation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511663673
Giles, Howard, Anthony Mulac, James J. Bradac, and Patricia Johnson. 1987. Speech accommodation theory: The first decade and beyond. In Communication Yearbook 10, ed. M. McLaughlin, 13–48. New York, NY: Routledge.
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, UK: Routledge.
Kuhl, Patricia K., Jean E. Andruski, Inna A. Chistovich, Ludmilla A. Chistovich, Elena V. Kozhevnikova, Viktoria L. Ryskina, ... and Lacerda, Francisco. 1997. Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science 277(5326):684–686. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.277.5326.684
Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Levey, David, and Tony Harris. 2002. Accommodating Estuary English. English Today (18)3:17–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0266078402003036
Love, Jessica, and Abby Walker. 2013. Football versus football: Effect of topic on /r/ realization in American and English sports fans. Language and Speech 56(4):443–460. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830912453132
Matthews, William. 1938. Cockney, Past and Present: A Short History of the Dialect of London. Detroit: Gale Research Company.
Milsom, Rosemarie. 2011. Jo Frost is the Supernanny [Article, Newcastle Herald]. Accessed 13 October 2016, http://www.theherald.com.au/story/438798/jo-frost-is-the-supernanny/
R Core Team. 2016. The R Project for statistical computing [Computer programme, Version 3.3.0]. Accessed 19 May 2016, http://www.r-project.org
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating “self-conscious” speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27(1):53–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404598001031
Schilling, Natalie. 2013. Investigating stylistic variation. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. J. K. Chambers and N. Schilling, 325–349. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Shapp, Allison, Nathan LaFave, and John V. Singler. 2014. Ginsburg v. Ginsburg: A longitudinal study of regional features in a Supreme Court Justice’s speech. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2):149–158. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol20/iss2/17/
Smiljanić, Rajka, and Ann R. Bradlow. 2008. Speaking and hearing clearly: Talker and listener factors in speaking style changes. Language and Linguistics Compass 3(1):236–264. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00112.x
Soderstrom, Melanie. (2007). Beyond babytalk: Re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants. Developmental Review 27(4):501–532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2007.06.002
Supernanny Fan. 2016. Supernanny The Jeans family [YouTube Video, Series 1, Episode 1, ABC]. Accessed 5 October 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0nAd_crci4
Uganda Be Kidding Me. 2014. Supernanny—The Gormley-Brickley family [YouTube Video, Series 4, Episode 2, Channel 4]. Accessed 24 September 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9AL34AGzEQ
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Published
26-Mar-2017
How to Cite
Blackwood, C. “Supernanny: An Intraspeaker Study of Addressee Effects in the Speech of Jo Frost”. Lifespans and Styles, Vol. 3, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 10-19, doi:10.2218/ls.v3i1.2017.1824.
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