Puffins, Toucans, and Zebras, Oh My!

After three and a half years in a place, you get a false sense of familiarity. You’ve settled into your job, your home, your daily routine and (of course) the ambient local dialect; the accents are much more intelligible and previously unfamiliar words are now familiar. But then you decide, “Hey, I should get my driver’s license driving licence,” and suddenly the world goes upside-down again.

In a few weeks I’m taking the theory (written) portion of the UK driving test. Studying for it has been a little frustrating and, occasionally, very amusing. Below are a dozen examples from the practice tests on Theory Test Pro. I’ve grouped them according to six themes that vary with respect to my source of amusement or frustration.

Theme 1. British terms that are just inherently funny.

To begin with, there’s the puffin (and pelican, toucan, and zebra) crossings:

These animal names are supposed to be mnemonics, and while I actually do find most the other ones vaguely helpful, “puffin” (pedestrian user-friendly intelligent crossing) is just not. I have this image of a bunch of guys sitting around a conference table with a list of animal names, trying to squeeze out a very awkward acronym and, well, succeeding.

Want another funny term? Well, there are many, but how about the ‘immobiliser’?

(The correct answer is ‘immobiliser’.) Superhero weapon, anyone?

Theme 2: Elements of British culture are charming, and this shows in their test questions. The best examples are the questions about sheep and horses:

(The correct answer, fwiw, is to stop. Posting this one on Facebook led to a rather long comment thread, including comments several people who had experienced this exact scenario. There are a lot of sheep in this country, people!)

Okay, this next one isn’t exactly ‘cultural’ (or maybe it is, I don’t know), but I find it similarly amusing that obtaining a UK driving licence entails having to learn the maximum speed limit of wheelchairs and scooters:

I was most interested to learn that they even have a speed limit.

Theme 3. The actual rules of the road. These are less funny, and more flabbergasting. One is that Brits use the handbrake a lot more than Americans do; in fact, more than the foot break.

I actually don’t think this is such a bad idea, but it will take some getting used to when I start driving lessons. Another rule is that you are supposed to use your mirrors a lot more often:

Again, this makes some sense, but I don’t know of any American state driving test that insists that you check your mirrors first before braking.

Okay, but the rule that really gets me is this: there is no right-of-way rule in the UK!

I simply do not understand this. If you do, please leave a comment and explain to me why this is a good idea!

Theme 4: The UK has some weird road signs. I won’t even get into the fact that a red circle means the same thing as what a red circle with a line through it means in the US. Here are just a few of the tougher ones:

Theme 5. Pure silliness. As is the case with all good multiple choice tests, there are the questions that you know the test-makers had a little fun with.

(For me, the lower left answer conjures up the image of Hell’s Angels in neon.)

Theme 6: What? Lastly, there are questions that are just flat-out perplexing:

My husband‘s guess for this one is that you’re not meant to signal to the pedestrian (which is what my incorrect guess was), but rather that you’re meant to signal to the hypothetical car that is behind you; the hand signal is meant to warn that driver that you’re slowing down unexpectedly (for zebras…!).

Please leave a comment if you actually understand what’s going on here.

And please wish me luck on my test.

Place Identity

One of my current research projects can be summed up by something I tweeted this morning:

A sociophonetician is the kind of linguist who cares about BOTH kinds of place identity.

I’ve been invited to speak in a couple months from now at the OSU Department of Linguistics’ Spring Symposium, “Locating Language: A Symposium on the Linguistics of Place.” Their description makes it immediately clear that by place they mean a social and geographical meaning of place:

A speaker’s hometown, birthplace, neighborhood, region, or country may be key, if not primary, factors in their self-identity…

The project that I plan to present at OSU builds on a talk I gave at least year’s Sociolinguistics Symposium, “Narratives of social change as predictors of sound change.” In brief, I show how a statistical model of back vowel pronunciation can be improved by adding a new quantitative variable that represents the way people think about their neighborhood (a neighborhood that’s undergone tremendous social change, allowing for a number of very different but equally valid ways people might think about it). Although this new variable it related to how old a person is and what ethnicity a person is, it’s not an exact fit, and so it accounts for variation in the data even above and beyond those other social factors.

But as I write up this research, I’m struck (as I think a lot of sociophoneticians are) about the messiness of using the word place in a paper like this, because it’s other meaning in linguistics: place of articulation. I’m writing  about back vowels — vowels that are typically pronounced in the back of the mouth. And one of the most important factors to put in a statistical model like this is where in the mouth the consonants are pronounced that appear on either side of the vowel being studying. If they’re also produced in the back of the mouth, then the vowel next to it is more likely going to also be pronounced further in the back of the mouth than the same vowel when it appears next to consonants with a place of articulation that’s further front (compare the words “tote” and “coal”).

For fun, click on this image for a link to a video of my articulators, changing place:

an fMRI image of Lauren’s articulators in resting position

(Image and video courtesy of Queen Margaret University’s CASL Research Centre & Ultrax)

Anyway, the point being that both of these uses of place might also be called place identity. It just depends on if you’re talking about the identity of the phoneme or the identity of the person.

Hair Salons + Speech Perception

The oddest thing happened the other day. (Linguistically, that is.) I was at the hairdresser. I’ve been going to the same person for a while now, but she works at a busy salon with lots of stylists in training who often do the pre-cut washing. So, in other words, I was getting my hair washed by someone new. As she started the wash she asked me, in a Scottish accent:

“Is that your natural [kəɾᵊl]?”

And then this inexplicable thing that happened: I heard that word as color. So I said “Yes, it is” because I don’t dye my hair. Then she said something like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, I’ve spent hours trying to get mine to look like that.” And this was confusing, because I have boring black hair. So then I realized, of course, she’s talking about my hair’s curl — just like every single stylist before her, for the last two decades, has always done! (And no, I’m not 20 years old; my hair went curly after puberty.)

So this is what makes this moment of misperception so baffling: I always get comments on my curls and I never get comments on my color. In theory, I could’ve predicted that she’d ask me about my curly hair before even saying anything at all! And prefacing the word with the word “natural” should’ve been absolutely foolproof for accurate perception, because I would bet that 99% of the occurrences of the word “natural” that I’ve encountered while in a hair salon have been collocated with the word “curl.”

Add to this the fact that I’m a linguist, and a sociophonetician at that, and that accents are my object of study, and that I’ve been living in Scotland for over two years now, and so I’ve heard this before (girl, world, swirl), and… This is all very embarrassing.

Linguistically, here’s what I find surprising. First, there’s all sorts of evidence from sentence processing that we do predict a word’s occurrence based on probabilities calculated on the fly from the words that precede it. Given two equally semantically probable options (as in this case), it’s not a far stretch to imagine than an individual’s personal experience would weight these probabilities further (e.g., me versus someone with straight hair who dyes it regularly). Second, I think it’s interesting that syllabicity apparently trumped phone identity. The /l/ precedes the /r/ in the word color but follows it in the word curl. But I was apparently happy to accept this swapping of liquid position because of the strength my mental representation of color as having two syllables and curl only having one. (Perhaps the fact of the /r/ being realized as a tap has something to do with it, but I’m not sure what.)

My analysis: The plural marking on count or mass nouns is often dropped in technical use, like fashionistas who say that like a certain kind of pant or cattle ranchers who talk about a lot of cow. While it may be relatively more colloquial to talk about someone’s curl, I’d still personally refer instead to someone’s curls (or curly hair). My own experience, both in and out of salons, is probably more with the sentence “Are those your natural curls?” than “Is that your natural curl?”. I think that if the initial verb had prepared me for a plural noun then there’s no way I would’ve misperceived the word as color, because my hair has only one color. Similarly, if there had been a final [s] after the word, it would’ve disambiguated the words as well. (And perhaps if I were greying a bit then this misunderstanding wouldn’t have happened, either.)

Another point in my defense, I mean, by way of explanation, is that hair salons are noisy. There was a blow-dryer going at the time just a few feet away, and there’s lots of research that shows that perception is degraded in noisy environments. (So there!)

Socially, what this experience did was reaffirm how relatively low my frequency of interaction is with people whose accents are ‘Scottish enough’ to have pronunciations such as [kəɾᵊl] for curl. I’ve talked about this before, but this was a strong reminder of that (unfortunate) fact.

The haircut that followed the aforementioned event.

P.S. I’m happy to receive corrections to my ad hoc transcription attempt (because hey, obviously I can’t hear as well as I’d like to think I can)! Since I have a lack of ‘authentic’ data (and please just accept those scare quotes and don’t get me started on ‘authenticity’), here’s a clip of a voice actor/trainer discussing the Scottish pronunciation of the word girl.

P.P.S. Throughout this post I’ve been self-conscious of my spelling choice for the word color. On Twitter, I always follow Lynne Murphy‘s practice of using a parenthesis around the variant letter, e.g., colo(u)r. But here, I thought that would be distracting. however, I do recogni(s/z)e the irony in using US spelling on a blog called vocalised…

Outdated? Or just American…

There’s something funny that happens when you are a student in one place and then a working person in another: the memories of time in school get mixed up with the memories of the place itself. Although this is clearly just how memory works — we remember things in the context in which they occurred — I think it’s central to some of the anxieties of expat life.

This summer my spouse and I shipped over all of our belongings from storage in the US to our new flat in Edinburgh. Among these items were several boxes of old papers and folders from my undergraduate and graduate work. Just this week I finally got around to sorting them into better-managed piles in my office. As I was doing so, I came across several spiral notebooks, as well as some three ring binders. The notebooks were three hole punched, so I decided to put them in the binders for storage. As I felt the click of the binder rings opening, I got a wave of nostalgia, and the feeling that I hadn’t felt that particular sensation in years. It was the sensation that the action itself was old-fashioned or outdated. But at the same time I had the conscious thought that three ring binders are just American, and not British, and that’s why I hadn’t seen or felt one in awhile. (The only hole punchers I’ve ever seen in the UK are two hole punchers. Three hole punchers are used with Letter-sized paper, and of course the UK uses A4 paper.) But then I wondered: do Americans still use three ring binders? Maybe everyone’s now living in a paperless society, and my feeling of nostalgia is indeed warranted! The point is, sitting here in my Edinburgh office, I can’t know the answer.

The two hole puncher that I keep in my office, next a postcard.

This got me wondering if I’m actually going around getting the two (“outdated” and “American”) confused more often than I know. I started thinking about all the different sensations of a place that become embedded in our memories, like how when I think of being “back in college” I can almost feel the heat of Tucson on my skin. But while I might be nostalgic for the oven-baked feeling (especially given the weather we’ve had this summer in the UK), that quality of Tucson weather is not going to change: Tucson is and will continue to be hot in the summer. With micro-aspects of human culture, like three ring binders, it’s a different scenario. While I’m in the UK I can’t know what little, seemingly insignificant objects are still being used in the US, and which ones are going out of use. If those little objects never existed in the UK in the first place, then when I see them again and get a wave of nostalgia I have no way of knowing if other Americans would agree with that feeling or if it’s my own expat nostalgia to bear. Of course, this is surely more likely to happen with physical objects and tactile sensations than it is with those things that are easily accessed via the internet, like music and news. Luckily for me, it’s probably less likely to happen with forms of language use… Or so I hope!

A Scot in Scottsdale

On BBC Radio Scotland’s “Sport Nation” programme today there was an interview with Martin Laird, the “Scot in Scottsdale,” a Glasweigan golfer who lives in Arizona. He was being interviewed because of his recent success at the World Golf Championships in Scottsdale. Immediately following the radio interview the hosts were making fun of his accent, one saying, “You know when I met Martin when he was a wee boy he didn’t have that accent! <laughs>”

I should say up front that I know absolutely nothing about golf and only just heard about his guy today. Laird is 29 years old and moved to the U.S. when he was 17. According to Wikipedia he went to university in Colorado, so his ambient variety for the past 12 years has been all Western U.S. English. Colorado and Arizona are relatively understudied with respect to English variation, though at one point in my life I cobbled this page together, and I hope to collect more data in Arizona later this year. But the one thing we do know for sure is that Colorado and Arizona are part of the wider geographical region that features the Low Back Vowel Merger, i.e., we say the vowels in cot and caught identically (for more on that, check out the the Atlas of North American English). In any case, that particular feature isn’t going to help much in this instance because those vowels are also merged in Scottish English (though the position of the merged vowel is different, so I suppose you could look at that).

Anyway, as an Arizonan in Scotland, I was clearly intrigued by Martin Laird’s accent. At least some of his vowels were noticeably Scottish to my ears, and the intonation patterns I’ve come to associate with Glasgow were also there. But the commentators were also right in that his accent wasn’t nearly as strong as that of, say, Rob Lawson, the Glasweigan sociolinguist who spent a good portion of his PhD studies in Tucson (and who has a good blog you should check out, too). Okay, maybe we don’t need a linguist to tell us that the longer a person stays in a place the more likely it is to affect them. But the extent to which an person can and will change their accent as an adult is an intriguing and active area of current research, and there are still a number of open research questions. (If you’re interested in the details, the go-to research on these issues is undoubtably Gillian Sankoff)

So, being who I am and listening to Laird on the radio made me think of running a fun little study comparing expats. Would a Glasweigan who spends 12 years in Colorado/Arizona sound like an Arizona who spends 12 years in Glasgow? (Obviously we’re need to find our Arizonan, since I’m not a viable candidate, not only because I’m not in Glasgow but because what you’d want would be someone who spends as much of their time around Scots as Laird spends around Arizonans, and as a university lecturer I spend more time talking to students from England and colleagues from the U.S. than I do talking to Scots. Not to mention that I just got here.) But say you could control for things like nativeness of network and level of network interaction, it would be cool to see what features change more than others, and specifically how the features of the two expats’ resultant varieties compare with one another. I think Jennifer Nycz, who studied Canadians in New York, likely has some smart thoughts about New Yorkers in Canada. The comment section is yours, Jen!

That radio interview with Laird was quite brief. I wish it’d gone on longer, because it would’ve been interesting to see if he might have gradually shifted back to sounding more Glasweigan the longer he talked to the BBC Radio Scotland interviewers. Near the end of the interview, for example, they asked him a question and he responded with “Aye” and it made me immediately wonder how often he says “Aye” in his daily life. Maybe a lot, for all I know; he’s in a particularly interesting position as a golfer, where Scottishness surely has high social capital. Of course, now I’m wondering about getting ahold of BBC archival recordings to track down earlier interviews with him… which of course I don’t have time for right now! This is why I blog, people. Someone should steal this idea and let me know how the research goes.

for size

(In the 2012 spirit of posting shorter posts, more often…)

—–

Last weekend I went shopping in Edinburgh’s New Town for a new pair of boots. Usually shoe shopping is fun, but this time I was getting frustrated. It was my third attempt to find something decent, and I’d already bought and returned a pair. The trouble is that I’m a UK size 5.5 and boot sizes seem to not be available in half-sizes, so everything I’d tried on was either too big (6) or too small (5). Anyway, when I finally found a pair that did fit (European size 38, fwiw), I was happy to reply in the affirmative when the salesperson asked me:

“How do those fit for size?”

Which was a perfectly intelligible question, and to which I answered:

“Great, I’ll take them.”

Then a split second later, I thought, “Hey, that’s question’s not actually grammatical to me!” And then in the next second I thought, “But the sentence ‘Try this on for size’ is grammatical to me…” And then, following that, I thought “but that sentence actually has no literal meaning to me.”

The point being that, until that moment, it had never occurred to me that the original meaning of ‘Try this one for size’ would ever actually involve someone trying on something for, well, size! I assume other Americans have this intuition as well?

 

2011 Retrospective

I’m inspired by Rachel Cotterill’s recent post to take this moment to reflect on the past twelve months. I told Jefferson that I’d try to balance this post between work-related events and personal ones, and he suggested I just do both. So if this post gets too long for your tastes, blame him.

In January I started teaching classes at my (now not-so) new job (because the department had graciously given me the Sept-Dec semester to settle in with only advising duties and reading groups to worry about). My first class at the University of Edinburgh was an MSc seminar introducing the topic of linguistic variation and indexical meaning. January was also the month when Jefferson and I started looking for a flat to buy in Edinburgh (something that still hasn’t happened, because it turns out that it’s not easy for recently-arrived Americans to get a mortgage in Britain).

In February, teaching got more intense, with the addition of lectures in 1st-year undergraduate Linguistics, 1st year undergraduate English Language (which were two separate courses that are now combined into one), and the beginning of an intense 6-week course in 2nd-year Linguistics (“Empirical Methods”). February 3 was the Asian Lunar New Year, which was a week or so after Burns’ Night, and I celebrated both with my first attempt at the blended event “Gung Haggis Fat Choy” by making homemade jiaozi stuffed with haggis. My plan in 2012 is to do it again but to make it a party!

Handmade haggis-filled jiaozi for Gung Haggis Fat Choy (January 2011)

In March I got a chance to return to Oxford for a weekend to present at and help run the “Sound Day” workshop, an interdisciplinary event that I co-organized with two other Oxford post-docs. I also had a rather high number of excellent meals with friends and colleagues that month!

In April I got the closest I’ve been so far to Wales — Chester, England — without actually going into Wales. I didn’t cross the border because I was too busy the whole time attending the fabulous VaLP conference that Phil Tipton organized and hosted at Chester. I then spent the rest of April recovering from the busy semester, especially by rediscovering the joy of reading novels (by starting with the Edinburgh-based 44 Scotland Street series).

In May I visited the University of Essex for the first time and then hosted a number of linguist-friends who were visiting Edinburgh. I also joined the Edinburgh Orchestral Ensemble, although, due to the very small number of participants (e.g., one week the conductor had to stop conducting and play the violin because there were no violins!), I dropped out that same month.

In June I examined a PhD viva for the first time (as the internal examiner), which was hard work but a great experience (congratulations, Dr. Corinne Maxwell-Reid!). I then flew to Boston for the ISLE conference; it was an excellent conference and I got to catch up with several old friends from UofA and Stanford who now live in Boston.

Participants in the ISLE 2011 conference workshop, "Mergers in English: Perspectives from phonology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics" (http://www.bu.edu/isle/isle-2011-conference-program/)

In July I had the fantastic experience of teaching at the Summer School of Sociolinguistics in Glasgow. And then, after years of waiting, I finally got to see my friends Sonny Singh and John Altieri perform live with their band, Red Baraat. They performed four times in one weekend in London and I saw three of the shows.

Red Baraat at the Barbican in London (July, 2011)

In August I attended my first ICPhS conference, which was in Hong Kong. (My slides are posted here.) It’d been 10 years since I’d been to Asia and I particularly love Hong Kong so it was another big 2011 highlight. Then Scotland won the bid for the next ICPhS meeting (in 2015), which was very exciting (and a bit nerve-wracking as well)! August was an intensely busy month personally as well, in part because we moved to a new flat (by bus, which Jefferson is very proud of), but mostly because of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Jefferson and I saw maybe two dozen shows or so, most of them not too awful (and some of them rather good!). Seeing Kristen Schaal perform, and both seeing and meeting Hari Kondabolu, were particularly cool moments (although I’m still jealous of Jefferson, who got to see and meet David Sedaris while I was away in Hong Kong).

Hong Kong at sunset, view from the convention centre (August 2011)

In September the semester started up again, with my first stab at the Honours Sociolinguistics research seminar and the (logistically complicated and, at first, very stressful) MSc Introduction to Sociolinguistics lecture. I also tried to join a Zumba class, which didn’t last more than two weeks…

Then after having taken two years away from my favorite conference (missing 2009 and 2010), in October I attended NWAV’s 40th anniversary and had a splendid time! Jefferson and I also started attending Salsa dance classes in October, which (unlike Zumba) we hope to get back to in 2012.

The NWAV40 "All-Star Panel" at Georgetown University (October 2011)

November was a big blur of teaching, advising, and giving talks (first in York and then in Freiburg at the “Indexing Authenticity” workshop). There’s not much personal to recount from November; my only day off was the day we went on strike, which I spent picketing and marching, so which didn’t really feel like a day off.

The UCU participating in the national strike for pensions on 30 November 2011 (in Edinburgh)

And finally we come to December, when classes quietly wound down and marking quickly stacked up. Jefferson and I stayed here in Scotland for the holidays instead of flying back to the States, and we celebrated our 5-year wedding anniversary by taking the “best rail journey in the world.” It was indeed beautiful, but it rained the whole time and our B&B in Mallaig lost electricity due to 90mph winds. I suppose that’s what happens when you plan a winter vacation in Scotland!

The Glenfinnan viaduct, famous for its use in the Harry Potter movies (December 2011)

2011 was a fantastic year but rather exhausting, in moments! My hope is that 2012 will be a little more laid back. And that I’ll get back to blogging more, too.