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Voice quality, rhythm and valorized femininities

Voice quality, rhythm and valorized femininities. Patrick Callier Georgetown University Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, 9/2/2010. Voice quality—review. Voice quality as index of speaker emotional or physical state e.g. creak = resignation (Laver 1980)

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Voice quality, rhythm and valorized femininities

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  1. Voice quality, rhythm and valorized femininities Patrick Callier Georgetown University Sociolinguistics Symposium 18, 9/2/2010

  2. Voice quality—review • Voice quality as index of speaker emotional or physical state • e.g. creak = resignation (Laver 1980) • Mass mediated representations of voice quality quite diverse • Teshigawara 2003 • reveals anime heroes’ and villains’ true nature • Starr 2006 • “Sweet” voice quality indexes speaker’s authentic femininity

  3. Rhythm—review • PVI (pairwise variability index): quantitative measure of local fluctuations in duration • Low PVIs usu. = “syllable-timing” (depends what interval you are using) • High PVIs usu. = “stress-timing” • Singaporean English, Spanish both more “syllable-timed” than many of worlds’ languages. • Cantonese, Mandarin, also heavily syllable-timed (Mok 2008).

  4. Rhythm, cont’d. • If what we are measuring is just durational variability (is it?), a measure of sample-wide duration variance should also be informative. • Enter ΔC, the standard deviation of a consonantal interval • Friends: ΔV, ΔS • Normalize for speech rate: VarcoΔC/V/S • Lower = less variability

  5. Sociolinguistics of rhythm • AAE’s transition from syllable-timed to stress-timed (Thomas and Carter 2006) • “Maria’s” adoption of syllable-timing as peer group changes (Carter 2006) • Final lengthening alongside other stylistic markers in unique –er of Australian immigrant English variety (Kiesling 2005)

  6. Data • Nüren hua ‘Women flowers’, 2008 mainland Chinese TV serial drama • Larger study: rhythm and voice quality in 6 characters (3 men, 3 women)

  7. Ouyang Xiu Lin Xuelian http://pic4.sdnews.com.cn/NewsImg/2008/3/5/U2389P28T3D1936726F326DT20080305115506.jpg http://www.hsgd.net.cn/userfiles/323232.jpg

  8. Methods • Voice quality • Identify potential stretches of creak auditorily • In case of ambiguous percept, use Praat to confirm spectral evidence • Measure presence and duration

  9. Methods, cont’d. • Rhythm • Use (normalized) syllabic PVI (nSPVI) and VarcoΔS (Mok 2008) • Use segmental spellings of Chinese orthography as syllabification guide

  10. Results • Divergence in voice quality • Similarity in rhythm

  11. Voice quality Percent creak (secs/sec)

  12. Rhythm

  13. Discussion • Lin is creaky • Also: a widow, trying to seduce the main character’s love interest, a wheeler-and-dealer (cf. Zhang’s [2008] “smooth operator”) • Ouyang is modal (perhaps breathy?) • Married, politically active, a schoolteacher, an accomplished fighter

  14. Discussion, cont’d. • Voice quality may still be indexical of “authentic” femininity or lack thereof • rubrics of valorization are culturally constrained • Modal voice (in contrast to Lin’s creak) valorizes a very martial, revolutionary type of woman

  15. Discussion, cont’d. • And rhythm? • Both relatively stress-timed compared to men • Analysis of rhythm’s social meaning may be enhanced by comparison with other speakers

  16. Conclusion • How to assess the social meaning of rhythm? • Rhythmic measures like PVI are highly variable within individuals • No clear stylistic effect at utterance level (pace Drager, Eckert and Moon 2008) • How do you hear a “rhythm switch”? • Is it all “similarity-to-variety X” type meaning?

  17. Conclusion • And voice quality? • When isn’t it a rheme of “essence”? • As a strategy to expand effective pitch range (Podesva 2007, Mendoza-Denton n.d.)? • What constrains these meanings?

  18. Thanks • Rob Podesva & his Language and Identity class for early feedback • Anastasia Nylund for valuable conversation and idea-swapping • Daanish and Hammad Ahmed for software help • Cala Zubair for hardware help

  19. Contact: Patrick Callier Georgetown University Department of Linguistics prc23@georgetown.edu

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