BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//events.la.psu.edu//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:STANDARD DTSTART:20201101T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20200308T020000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT UID:16981-7093ba030c5112876cd1fc3d3711667b@events.la.psu.edu DTSTAMP:20260307T150249Z DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20230414T090000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20230414T103000 SUMMARY:Dr. Betsy Sneller (Michigan State University) DESCRIPTION:“How Social Meaning Impacts Linguistic Borrowing”\n\nDr. Bet sy Sneller\, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State Univer sity\n\nFriday\, April 14\, 9:00–10:30 a.m. EDT\, in 127 Moore Building and virtually via Zoom\n\nNaturalistic data – whether focused on rich et hnographic data or large-scale corpus data – have been the cornerstone o f modern sociolinguistic research\, providing the primary data for socio linguistic theory. But more recent advances in computational and experim ental approaches also offer additional insight into hypotheses drawn fro m naturalistic data.\n\nIn this talk\, Betsy Sneller begins with an anal ysis of ethnographic research conducted in a neighborhood in South Phila delphia\,demonstrating that white men who are in regular hostile contact with their African American neighbors have borrowed the African America n English (AAE) feature of (TH)-fronting (pronouncing /θ/ as /f/\, as in “bofe” for “both”). This result is in itself somewhat surprising\, as w hite speakers using features of AAE typically also exhibit a positive af filiation towards Black folk or Black culture (e.g.\, Cutler 1997\, Swee tland 2002\, Fix 2010)\, while her participants exhibit overtly hostile attitudes toward their Black neighbors. She argues that\, for these whit e speakers\, (TH)-fronting is underspecified for ethnolect and is theref ore available to be borrowed as an index of “toughness”.\n\nIn the secon d half of her talk\, she presents the results of a laboratory experiment designed to test the central hypotheses drawn from this ethnographic wo rk. Using an artificial language game\, she demonstrates that borrowing across dialects propagates at a higher rate when a linguistic feature is a higher-order index than when it is a first-order index. In other word s\, a feature was borrowed more readily when it was both alienable (when it was associated with “tough” players rather than the species of playe r) and when it was socially relevant (in this case\, when fighting was a n option in game play). Variants that were either alienable or socially relevant – but not both – were treated like first-order variants\, sugge sting that the difference between first-order indexicality and higher-or der indexicality is categorical rather than gradient.\n\nFor more detail s: https://events.la.psu.edu/event/dr-besty-sneller-michigan-state-unive rsity/ X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:

“How Social Meaning Impacts Linguistic Borrowing”

Dr. Betsy Sneller, Assis tant Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University

< p style="text-align: center">Friday, April 14, 9:00–10:30 a.m. E DT, in 127 Moore Building and virtually via Zoom
Naturali stic data – whether focused on rich ethnographic data or large-scale cor pus data – have been the cornerstone of modern sociolinguistic research, providing the primary data for sociolinguistic theory. But more recent advances in computational and experimental approaches also offer additio nal insight into hypotheses drawn from naturalistic data.
In this talk, Betsy Sneller begins with an analysis of ethnographic research con ducted in a neighborhood in South Philadelphia,demonstrating that white men who are in regular hostile contact with their African American neigh bors have borrowed the African American English (AAE) feature of (TH)-fr onting (pronouncing /θ/ as /f/, as in “bofe” for “both”). This result is in itself somewhat surprising, as white speakers using features of AAE typically also exhibit a positive affiliation towards Black folk or Blac k culture (e.g., Cutler 1997, Sweetland 2002, Fix 2010), while her parti cipants exhibit overtly hostile attitudes toward their Black neighbors. She argues that, for these white speakers, (TH)-fronting is underspecifi ed for ethnolect and is therefore available to be borrowed as an index o f “toughness”.
In the second half of her talk, she presents the re sults of a laboratory experiment designed to test the central hypotheses drawn from this ethnographic work. Using an artificial language game, s he demonstrates that borrowing across dialects propagates at a higher ra te when a linguistic feature is a higher-order index than when it is a f irst-order index. In other words, a feature was borrowed more readily wh en it was both alienable (when it was associated with “tough” players ra ther than the species of player) and when it was socially relevant (in t his case, when fighting was an option in game play). Variants that were either alienable or socially relevant – but not both – were treated like first-order variants, suggesting that the difference between first-orde r indexicality and higher-order indexicality is categorical rather than gradient.
For more details: https://events.la.psu.ed u/event/dr-besty-sneller-michigan-state-university/
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