Manitoba English

Git 'R Done!

2009-05-24T23:11:00.003-05:00

I sent my advisor today a version of what I have worked on up to this point... and it's not looking too bad! It's kind of a huge mess, and there is probably far more information and much less explanation than it needs right now - but this is still an early draft, so that's all right.

I also realized that the whole thing was still single-space, so I double-spaced it all, and it's now nearly 60 pages (without references)! That makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing at this point.

Deadlines...

2009-05-23T18:17:00.001-05:00

So, there is now a ticking clock hanging over me. I need to wrap this thesis up by sometime this fall. It's already taken far too long, as clearly evidenced by the sporadic posts on this here blog. However, I do feel a bit of new "wind in my sails". I'm nearly finished my latest review/revision session of what I have now, and have a good plan in place to have a more or less complete version within about 3 months' time. Wish me luck!

So... what have you been doing lately?

2008-11-08T13:27:00.004-06:00

Well, we had our second successful "lab group" meeting at the Linguistics Lab yesterday. The group consists of my advisor, Prof. Hagiwara (usually known as Rob), Prof. Russell (Kevin), as well as my fellow M.A. candidates Kana Suzuki and Trudy Mitton. Trudy wasn't there yesterday, but we got to meet Kristen (sp?) who is a Ph.D. interdisciplinary student investigating child sign language acquisition. Rob and Kana had accomplished pretty much everything I had since the last meeting, which was nothing, so I didn't feel so bad. However, I am determined to make a change to that. And then I realized it's been...uh... three months since I updated this blog!?

OK, so I have my thesis document open on my laptop (actually my wife's laptop because I had to take mine into Best Buy for repairs LAST WEEK and they just called TODAY to say they are shipping it to Toronto...) and I am going to write down everything that I have been explaining to people about what it is that I am working on. Then I will print that out. Then I will give it to everyone at the next meeting. Then I will have DONE SOMETHING. And I will feel much better about it!

First Thesis Meeting of the Summer

2008-08-19T21:22:00.002-05:00

It was so hot today that Winnipeg city hall reversed its policy of closing all city wading pools by a specified date, and set out to reopen as many as feasible due to the "heat wave" we are having. Yes, this is important local news.

It was also so hot today that I had to have a meeting to discuss my thesis progress, lest it all melt away. Rob (my advisor) met me at Starbuck's, and we walked from there to one closed restaurant after another, until finally making our way to the Toad in the Hole, which has now been the site of at least three linguistics "meetings" for me.

Rob assured me that I was on the right track, discussed what direction he thought I should keep working in, and proposed setting up regular meetings for a few of us who are working on our theses at the U of M right now. I think those will really help me out, since I rarely make it down to the university these days.

What the r is going on?

2008-08-04T19:36:00.002-05:00

I have been searching for evidence in my data that words ending in -r which are composed of one morpheme are behaving differently with regards to Canadian Raising than are similar words composed of two morphemes. In other words, a pair of words such as hire (one morpheme) and higher (two) would not, under my hypothesis, show the same degree or quality of raising. But I have also been noticing some evidence that there are some differences in regards to the quality of the final -r in such pairs of words, as well.

When it comes to the vowels, single-morpheme r-final words seem to show a smaller range of movement across all formants, while comparable bimorphemic words show a greater degree of change. In the bimorphemic words, F1 and F2 seem to start looking "pinched together", stay that way for a period of time, and then rapidly separate (F1 descends, F2 rises). For monomorphs, there is less pinching and a more gradual slope for both formants - they also seem to not go either quite as high nor quite as low as for the bimorphs. F3 is generally slightly higher across the board for the bimorphs versus the monomorphs.

I've focused the arrangement of my data to look at the vowels, but I'm starting to see that this difference in formant movement carries into the r, for at least some distance. Now my task is to rearrange the data so that I can create some charts that provide more detail as to what's going on in the r part of these words.

Some of the factors involved...

2008-08-04T16:47:00.004-05:00

The big challenge in dealing with all the data I have collected is to figure out what factors are relevant. In analyzing the recorded speech of my volunteers, I have worked out how to pull out the following pieces of information: duration of the vowel (in milliseconds); duration of the vowel + /r/ for those words ending in /r/ (it can be tricky to separate the /r/ from the vowel); the first three "formants" (or harmonics) of the vowels at nine different points throughout the vowel, giving a "snapshot" of the vowel at 10% of the way through, 20%, 30% ... 80%, and 90%. That's the raw data, plus general characteristics of the words (what word is it, what is the vowel, what is the consonant) and of the speakers (they are all Manitoba-born English-speaking females, of slightly varying ages).

To all of that I have been able to add some information about lexical frequency. When I first developed the idea of this topic, I suspected that lexical frequency might be an important factor in whether or not raising would occur for a given word or not, so I thought I need to include it. For some time I wasn't sure of the best way to do that, but I recently found a great website developed by Prof. Mark Davies that allows anyone to go and search through some fantastic corpus databases. All told, the English language corpora have an astounding 560 million words. By searching through and recording the hits, I am able to add "hits per million" to the information I have for each word in my data, and hopefully I will be able to correlate this with all the other information I have.

That's pretty much where I'm at right now, playing with the numbers, creating graphs, and trying to see which of these factors are important, and how they are related to and affect one another.

The First Post

2008-08-04T14:09:00.002-05:00

OK - so I've started a new blog. My last blog was basically a collection of random things I found online. I soon got tired of that, and deleted the whole thing. Since then I have participated in a fantastic multi-user blog called "A Love for Art" where I have submitted photography and poetry. That's been fun, and I still intend to contribute to it. However, this particular blog here has a focus - to record the progress I make on the thesis I am writing for my M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Manitoba.

Some of you reading this may know me as a musician. Some of you may know me as a graduate student. A few of you might know me as both. They are two pretty separate and distinct worlds. For those who don't know the linguist side of me, I decided to investigate the idea of following up on my 1994 B.A. in Linguistics/Asian Studies with an M.A. back in 2000, when my wife Annika became pregnant with our daughter Shoki. After meeting some of the new professors in the department, notably Rob Hagiwara, who has become my thesis advisor, and Jila Ghomeshi (sister of CBC's Jian Ghomeshi), who has been a big inspiration to me over the past few years, Annika and I left for a year to South Korea, where I taught English and where Shoki was born (that's another story...) On returning to Canada I enrolled in two courses at the U of M, just to get my feet wet again in academia. I took Syntactic Theory and Phonological Theory, during which I found that I was actually still interested in school, and got caught up on some of the intervening decade of linguistic progress. I decided that I would like to pursue the M.A. at that point, but as I didn't have a 4-year B.A. I need to take more courses in order to qualify. A couple of years and several classes later, I was able to finally register as a graduate student. I have since completed all the required coursework, which leaves a completed thesis as the only thing standing between me and my degree.

I took a while to pick my topic, and settled on one that is Canadian-themed. My research will investigate the properties of vowels as spoken in the population of southern Manitoba (Winnipeg), and specifically the diphthong /ai/ involved in the phonological process called "Canadian Raising". This is the change that occurs in both /ai/ and also /au/ when they occur before voiceless sounds such as /t/, /k/, /s/, /p/ etc. and give us the distinctive Canadian difference in pronunciation between words like "wide" (no raising) and "white" (with raising). Americans are known to especially comment on our pronunciation of the /au/ diphthong as in "about", or "aboot" as it is often characterized. But my thesis will focus on the raising of /ai/.

There are two aspects of /ai/ as pronounced in Winnipeg and Manitoba which have come to my attention, and that I hope to investigate in my thesis. The first is that among many of us here, raising of /ai/ is not restricted only to pre-voiceless positions, but can also occur before /r/, as in words such as "fire" and "wire". This is, as far as I have been able to find, something that has not been previously noted in anyone else's research into Canadian English (someone please tell me if they are aware of any information to the contrary!).

The second interesting aspect of raising in Manitoba concerns the raising of /ai/ before /r/ - namely, the fact that raising does not always occur. My impression is that /ai/ is much more likely to occur, and is more pronounced, when it occurs within a single morpheme, as in "fire" and "wire". When /ai/ and /r/ are separated by a morpheme boundary, as in words which contain a suffix such as "higher" or "sigher", then raising either occurs less than in other cases, or not at all.

My thesis is an attempt to research and document evidence for these phenomena. So far, I have recorded a number of volunteer speakers (though I would still like to add a few more), tagged and analyzed their recordings, and am compiling a multi-page spreadsheet which is producing some interesting results, though I am not entirely sure of their significance at this stage.

This blog is a means primarily for myself to be able to follow my own progress, but also for the sake of anyone interested in looking over my virtual shoulder. Hopefully, my posting here will keep me focused and on track, but also allow me to review my thought process over this course of this project.