Cross-speaker covariation across six vocalic changes in New York City English

Abstract

This article examines differences in the way that innovative variants for six vocalic changes in New York City English—too-fronting, raising of price and face and lowering of bad, thought and dress—co-occur across speakers, and explores social correlates of these patterns of covariation. We report on an analysis of a recently developed corpus of conversational speech from 140 speakers. The analysis suggests that patterns of covariation across speakers are conditioned by the local social embedding of the changes. Changes affecting highly localized realizations for raised bad and thought are distributed differently from supra-local changes affecting too and dress.