Departing from studies of English in New York City (NYC) which mainly focus on phonology (Becker 2009, Becker & Cogshall 2009, Labov 2006, Newman 2014), this paper adopts a metapragmatic approach (Urban 2006) in order to... [ view full abstract ]
Departing from studies of English in New York City (NYC) which mainly focus on phonology (Becker 2009, Becker & Cogshall 2009, Labov 2006, Newman 2014), this paper adopts a metapragmatic approach (Urban 2006) in order to examine linguistic signs that are about the pragmatic code and how to interpret the extrasemantic meanings encoded in speech. It focuses on metapragmatic comments in three different sets of data: (1) interview data from an ongoing corpus-building project (Tortora et al. in progress) (N=25), (2) performance data from 15 YouTube videos on ‘how to talk like a New Yorker, and (3) commentaries posted by YouTube viewers referencing what New Yorkers 'sound like' (N=150).
YouTube comments such as 1 below illustrate not only which linguistic patterns are most commonly identified with local speech in NYC, but also how individuals position their own practices in relationship to these patterns (cf. Rhymes and Leone 2014). Although not explicitly formulated, the sociolinguistic deviance of this variety is inferred pragmatically by orthographic choices such as non-rhoticity ( ‘lobster’; ‘refrigerator’) and affricated stops ( ‘the’). The non-normativity of these patterns is further indexed by the non-standard orthography of the contracted copula in , framing speakers as lacking standard grammar and education. The overall effect is to position the code as low status and vernacular, while leaving open the possibility of other meanings linked to existing stereotypes about New Yorkers.
1. therez a lobsta in da refrigerata
The analysis illustrates how the features and social identities associated with “talking like a New Yorker” are experienced and negotiated by individuals and how they come to be socially recognized as indexical of a certain set of speaker attributes (Agha 2005; cf. Bolander 2016). Furthermore, combining three different sets of data can greatly complement and expand traditional variationist work by illustrating how people experience and make sense of linguistic variation (Johnstone 2016, Leone-Pizzighella and Rymes 2017; Rhymes 2014) and provide additional insight into social dynamics that lead to language change.
